A Venezuelan court seized the headquarters of El Nacional newspaper on Friday after the newspaper failed to pay a USD $13.3 million fine in a defamation lawsuit. The case was brought by Diosdado Cabello, the Vice President of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela, after the newspaper reprinted an article linking Cabello to drug [...]
The High Court of Ireland on Friday struck down Facebook’s attempt to avoid the Irish Data Protection Commission’s (DPC) regulatory process. The DPC initiated its inquiry into Facebook’s data set through the Irish Data Protection Act 2018 in mid-April. This data set includes personal information of more than 500 million Facebook users worldwide, and the [...]
A judge in Italy’s Catania in the Sicily region on Friday ordered that Italian Senator Matteo Salvini will not stand trial for refusing to allow migrants to disembark from a coastguard ship in July 2019. The right-wing leader had been accused of kidnapping the migrants. From June 2018 to September 2019, Salvini, the leader of far-right [...]
Official probe prompted the attorney general of Cyprus Friday to file the first criminal suit over its cash-for-passports scheme, by which thousands of passports may have been wrongly issued to rich unqualified foreigners. A total of 37 charges have been filed against five individuals and four companies. Additional cases relating to the probe by the ad hoc [...]
Five organizations working for migrant rights Thursday asked Qatar to reveal the location of Malcolm Bidali, a security guard from Kenya who wrote about the issues faced by migrant workers in the country and was arrested by the police on May 4. Prior to his arrest, Bidali had discussions with trade unions and civil society organizations [...]
A special five-judge bench at the High Court of Kenya on Thursday declared the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI)-driven Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill 2020 unconstitutional. The main case was filed by five activists, namely David Ndii, Jerotich Seii, James Ngondi, Wanjiku Gikonyo, and Ikal Angelei. The judgment deals with 17 issues that had been raised in eight [...]
On Thursday, the UK government imposed new sanctions on Libya’s al-Kaniyat militia and its leaders for violations of international law. The militia is reportedly responsible for 27 mass graves containing hundreds of residents reported missing in the Libyan town of Tarhuna. The group has allegedly committed atrocities such as torture, murder, arbitrary detention, and enforced [...]
The Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights urged the Greek state to end its pushback of asylum seekers at the border. Commissioner Dunja Mijatovic expressed her concerns following the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment indicating reception of “consistent and credible allegations” of pushbacks which appeared to [...]
The US Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control Wednesday removed Jesús “El Rey” Zambada, who had testified against Sinaloa drug cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, from its Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List. Sanctions had been placed on Zambada for his involvement in the drug cartel. A department official stated that [...]
An Australian think tank released a report on the declining birth rates among the Uyghur population in China’s western Xinjiang province, concluding that China’s birth-control policies imposed on the Uyghurs may constitute genocide. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) analyzed the publicly-available data on birthrates in China from 2011 to 2019, and found that birth rates [...]
