China announced Saturday the ratification of an extradition treaty with Turkey that it intends to use, inter alia, to accelerate the return of refugees and Uighur Muslims suspected of “terrorism.” Since the 1950s, Turkey has welcomed Uighurs fleeing persecution in China. Uighurs and Turks have linguistic, cultural and religious ties. Currently, more than 50,000 Uighurs call [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Monday that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on the number of attendees at religious gatherings were likely to be a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The Court enjoined the state from enforcing these limits, put in place to address [...]
The Parliament of Victoria in Australia is set to go through the second reading of the Spent Convictions Bill early next year. The new law is aimed at preventing discrimination based on previous convictions to provide youths an opportunity to move past minor offenses. The bill was introduced this year as a means to ensure [...]
The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Monday announced that the agency is in the process of adopting its final greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions standards that will apply to certain new commercial airplanes manufactured in the US, including all new large passenger planes and commercial jets. The rule will apply to “new-type design airplanes” whenever [...]
Well-known women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul was sentenced to five years and eight months imprisonment Monday in Saudi Arabia’s Specialized Criminal Court (SCC) for terrorism and national security offences. Reuters reported that 31-year-old al-Hathloul was charged under sweeping counter-terrorism laws with “seeking to change the Saudi political system and harming national security”. Given that al-Hathloul [...]
According to Reuters Monday, Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating Oleksandr Tupytskyi, the Chairman of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine, for suspected bribery of a witness. The alleged incident under investigation occurred in 2018 when Tupytskyi was deputy Chairman of the Constitutional Court. The Constitutional Court has been at odds with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy since October. Zelensky [...]
On Saturday, the National People’s Congress of China enacted a measure establishing a new intellectual property court in the southern island of Hainan. China has sought to strengthen Hainan’s position as a global free trade port in the South China Sea, competing with other shipping centers in the area such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and [...]
Viasna, a non-governmental human rights center in Belarus, said that seven more people were detained in Belarus on Sunday during the traditional weekend protests against President Alexander Lukashenko, who won his sixth term in office in a disputed election. The total number of detainees is now reported to be over twenty people. According to a [...]
Congressman Louie Gohmert and a group of Republican electors from Arizona filed a lawsuit on Sunday in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, arguing that the Electoral Count Act is unconstitutional. The complaint asserts that the Electoral Count Act’s dispute resolution provisions violate the Electors Clause and the Twelfth Amendment of the [...]
Rights organizations decried the four year prison sentence handed down to Zhang Zhan, a citizen-journalist, by a Chinese court on Monday. She was found guilty of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” charges sometimes used by authorities to quell dissent. Zhang, a 37-year-old former lawyer, had reported on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan beginning in February. [...]
