Amenesty International on Tuesday warned that China’s new Supervision Law is a “systemic threat to human rights.” The stated purpose of the new law is to centralize local and provincial supervision bodies in order to limit corruption. However, Amnesty expressed its concerns over the new supervision body, “the Liuzhi system,” which creates a body that [...]

Golos , a Russian organization which advocates for fair elections, reported numerous, large-scale instances of electoral fraud at Sunday’s election, in which Vladimir Putin was reelected. In addition to members monitoring the voting facilities in person, the organization received 2,000 written reports of violations on election day and six thousand calls to the organization’s hotline. [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case concerning the Minnesota revocation-upon-divorce statute, which revokes an ex-spouse’s beneficiary designation once the couple divorces. The relevant part of the statute states: “the dissolution or annulment of a marriage revokes any revocable … beneficiary designation … made by an individual to the individual’s former [...]

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant on Monday signed into law the country’s strictest abortion law, prompting Mississippi’s only abortion clinic to file a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi challenging the Act’s constitutionality and requesting it be immediately blocked. The Gestational Age Act bans abortions when the fetus is 15 [...]

The US District Court for the Middle of Pennsylvania on Monday dismissed the lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania Republican legislators seeking to throw out the new electoral map designed by the state Supreme Court. Also on Monday, the US Supreme Court denied a separate appeal from the original Pennsylvania Supreme Court case that resulted in the [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein on Monday said the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) violated human rights law after a report emerged that the DRC severely restricted and violently suppressed the right to freedom of peaceful assembly since early 2017. The report documents killings and other serious human rights [...]

UN human rights experts on Monday called for the immediate release of two human rights defenders in Iran after reports emerged that the two defenders had been subjected to beatings in detention. Atena Daemi and Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee were allegedly transferred from prisons after being ill-treated. They subsequently staged hunger strikes in protest against their [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty in Arizona under the Eighth Amendment. Abel Hidalgo was sentenced to death for two counts of first degree murder in 2015. He appealed to the Supreme Court of Arizona, which upheld the death sentence and found that [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday granted certiorari in Nielsen v. Preap to rule on the mandatory detention of noncitizens who are released from criminal custody. The question before the court is whether, “a criminal alien becomes exempt from mandatory detention under 8 USC § 1226(c) if, after the alien is released from criminal custody, [...]

JUIRST Guest Columnist Benjamin G. Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law discusses the potential implications of Gina Haspel as CIA Director Designate…. I. Ah, if the Obama Administration had only followed my advice! November 15, 2016, after teaching class in Toledo, I had driven overnight from Toledo with a student, Victor Aberdeen, [...]