A Hong Kong court found Cheng Wing-chun guilty of insulting China’s National Anthem under the National Anthem Ordinance on Wednesday. Cheng is the first person to be convicted under this ordinance. This was after he allegedly insulted the national anthem and desecrated the regional flag. Cheng was convicted shortly after he used a 2019 anti-government [...]

The Parliament of Ghana passed an extreme anti-gay bill on Wednesday, which is set to tighten laws against members of the LGBTQ+ community. Ghana’s 275 members of Parliament unanimously passed the bill, known as the 2021 Promotion of Appropriate Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill. The bill is set to criminalize the promotion, advocacy, funding [...]

A court in El Salvador sentenced former Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes, to a term of six years in prison Wednesday on charges of tax evasion. Funes is also alleged to have involvement with criminal syndicates within El Salvador, leading to his indictment and subsequent conviction with a prison term of 14 years. Funes is a [...]

Kenyan Interior Minister Kithure Kindiki announced Wednesday that Kenya is delaying plans to reopen its border with Somalia due to a wave of attacks linked to al Qaeda militants. Earlier in May, Kindiki announced plans to re-open Kenya’s Mandera border crossing with Somalia after a ten-year shutdown. The announcement comes as the number of refugees [...]

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Wednesday announced that an Ottawa man accused of “advocating a violent far-right ideology” was arrested and faces both terrorism and hate propaganda charges, which the RCMP states is a first for Canadian law enforcement. The accused is alleged to have helped to produce three “terrorist propaganda videos” for the [...]

United Kingdom (UK) Defense Secretary Ben Wallace announced Wednesday that UK Special Forces are the focus of an inquiry into allegations of “unlawful activity” in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013. The independent inquiry, which Wallace commissioned in 2022, addresses allegations that the response by Royal Military Police investigating whether unlawful killings had been carried out [...]

The United Nations (UN) has called on the Iranian government to stop executing individuals who were sentenced to death for participating in anti-government protests Wednesday. The UN fact-finding mission urged Iranian authorities to release all those detained for exercising their right to peaceful assembly and freedom of the press to report on the protests. The [...]

Canada, Sweden, Ukraine and the United Kingdom (UK) filed a joint application Tuesday instituting proceedings against the Islamic Republic of Iran before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) claiming that Iran has violated its obligations under the Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil Aviation (otherwise known as the Montreal [...]

In 2012, I authored a book called “Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court is not a Court, and its Justices are not Judges.” The thesis of the book was that, due to a perfect storm of factors, the Supreme Court in practice makes all-things-considered decisions, not legal decisions, with the only real constraint on the [...]

Amnesty International Tuesday urged Cameroonian authorities to look into human rights violations committed in Anglophone regions of Cameroon. According to their report, armed separatists and the military have been accused of killing, torture, rape and destruction of property. Amnesty International’s Regional Director for West and Central Africa, Samira Daoud commented: We call on Cameroonian authorities [...]