The Scottish parliament approved a bill on Tuesday making sanitary products free to all women. The bill passed through the first stage of Scotland’s lawmaking process almost unanimously, with no opposition and only one abstention. Once enacted, the law would make women’s sanitary products freely available at designated public places. The bill, known as The [...]

Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled on Wednesday that individuals have a right to a self-determined death. This ruling overturns a previous ban on professionally-assisted suicide. Section 217 of the German Criminal Code previously provided punishments of up to three years of imprisonment or a fine to anyone who, with the intention to help another individual [...]

The High Court of the Indian capital of New Delhi directed police Wednesday to register First Information Reports (FIR) against political leaders for provocative speeches inciting violence in the city. It ordered the police commissioner to watch video clips of inflammatory statements by political leaders and lodge FIRs. In India, an FIR is a written [...]

Gui Minhai, a Hong Kong-born bookseller who became a Swedish citizen in 1996, was sentenced to 10 years in prison on Tuesday by China’s Ningbo Intermediate People’s Court for illegally providing information overseas. Minhai originally disappeared in 2015 while in Thailand. A statement by an EU spokesperson released Wednesday morning says, “ rights, including inter [...]

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, whose 30-year rule ended when he was ousted from office during the conflict that came to be known as the Arab Spring in 2011, died Tuesday in Cairo at the age of 91. Mubarak served as the fourth president of Egypt from 1981 following the assassination of Anwar Sadat, to [...]

In a document released by the UN Human Rights Council on Monday, a Special Rapporteur analyzed the concept of “psychological torture” under human rights law. Ever since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the report says, the international community has done impressive work addressing its prohibition on torture. But “at the same time,” [...]

The US Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in Hernandez v. Mesa on Tuesday, holding that the parents of a Mexican child who was shot and killed by a border official have no right to seek a remedy in American civil court. The child, Jesus Hernandez, had been playing with friends in a dry culvert [...]

The extradition hearings for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange began in a UK court on Monday. The hearing marked the beginning of a week of arguments, which will be followed by three weeks of hearings in May. District Judge Vanessa Baraister agreed to the additional time in January, which both sides accepted as necessary due to [...]

Thailand’s Constitutional Court dissolved the Future Forward Party on Friday and banned 16 of its leaders from politics for 10 years. The party was charged with violations of election laws by taking a 191 million baht loan from the party’s billionaire leader, Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit. The decision, which leaves open the possibility that the elections commission [...]

A Cairo Criminal Court acquitted two sons of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak of stock exchange manipulation Friday. The court acquitted six other individuals of the same charges. Officials arrested Mubarak’s sons, Alaa and Gamal, in September of 2018 as part of an ongoing stock exchange manipulation investigation that began in 2012. An Egyptian court [...]