The Law and Justice party (PiS) of Poland on Wednesday indicated that it plans to unveil legislation to allow the government to expand coal mine operations. PiS intends for half of Poland’s electricity to be generated by coal from its own mines by 2050. This decision is juxtaposed with the EU’s goal of carbon neutrality, [...]

The US Department of State on Thursday announced sanctions preventing Raúl Castro, former president of Cuba and the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party and First Secretary of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, from traveling to the US. The sanction was imposed under section 7031(c) of the FY 2019 Department [...]

UN Human Rights Chief Michelle Bachelet on Wednesday signed a deal with the new government of Sudan to open a Human Rights Office in the capital of Khartoum. In addition to the capital office, there will be four field offices in Darfur, Blue Nile, Southern Kordofan and East Sudan to safeguard human rights. Former Sudanese [...]

The US and Japan on Wednesday reached a trade agreement in agriculture, industrial goods and digital trade. Japan will eliminate or lower tariffs for some US agriculture products and will set quotas for other products from the US, which will lead to more than 90 percent of US food imported into Japan being duty free [...]

German prosecutors have filed charges against Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, Chairman Hans Dieter Pötsch and former CEO Martin Winterkorn, according to a statement Tuesday. The indictment charges the executives with intentionally misleading shareholders by withholding information about the company’s 2015 emissions-cheating scandal. In September 2015, authorities in the US revealed that Volkswagen had rigged millions [...]

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) Tuesday, urging action to protect human rights. The report focuses on the impact of global climate change on individuals who live in mountainous, coastal and Arctic regions. Roughly 1.42 billion people live in communities [...]

The UK’s High Court ruled Wednesday that a transgender man who had given birth to a child must be legally registered as the mother of the child. The issue arose when a transgender man gave birth to a child and wished to be legally registered as the father or, alternatively, the parent of the child. [...]

The General Court of the European Union on Tuesday struck down an order from the European Commission for Starbucks to pay €30m in back taxes to the Netherlands. The Netherlands entered into an advance pricing agreement (APA) with Starbucks in 2008, but the Commission later found in 2015 that the APA “constituted aid incompatible with [...]

The European Court of Justice held on Tuesday that Google does not need to remove personal information upon request from versions of its search engine outside of the EU. “Right to be forgotten” laws, first passed by the EU in 2014 and expanded under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in 2018, allow a person [...]

The UK Supreme Court held on Tuesday that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament in early September was unlawful. Johnson moved to prorogue Parliament in early September, stating that the current term was one of the longest in recent history and that Parliament should be temporarily dismissed so that the government could develop a [...]