Texas’ Republican-controlled Senate gave final approval to a bill that would enable publicly funded foster care and adoption agencies to refuse the placement of children with non-Christian, unmarried or gay prospective parents due to religious objections. The “Freedom to Serve Children Act” was passed early Monday and will now go to Governor Greg Abbott for [...]

The High-Level Group on the Health and Human Rights of Women, Children and Adolescents released a report Tuesday imploring world leaders to allocate 5 percent of their country’s GDP in “public health spending,” according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) . Tarja Halonen, former president of Finland and co-chair [...]

A Gambian court issued an order to freeze former president Yahya Jammeh’s remaining assets on Monday. Justice Minister Abubacarr Tambadou said that the order was “necessitated after the discovery of unlawful withdrawals” between 2006 and 2016 that possibly totaled $50 million. The order affects 131 properties, 88 bank accounts, 14 companies associated with the former [...]

The Texas Civil Rights Project (TCRP) filed a lawsuit on Monday to challenge a recently passed bill that they claim unlawfully targets immigrants. One provision of Senate Bill 4 (SB4) permits authorities to demand immigration or citizenship status from any individual suspected to be an undocumented person in an attempt to eliminate sanctuary cities. TCRP [...]

A trial over the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey began at a prison courtroom in Sincan on Monday. Two hundred of the 221 defendants in the case were marched into the courtroom before a group of protesters, some of whom threw nooses and demanded the death penalty. Many of the protesters had lost relatives [...]

UN expert on freedom of religion Ahmed Shaheed stated on Monday that Houthi de facto authorities in Yemen must end harassment against the Bahá’í community in Sana’a. Shaheed’s statement was prompted by reports of increased arbitrary arrests and detentions against the Bahá’í community. In addition to demanding Bahá’í community members be released, he also said [...]

The US Supreme Court held unanimously Monday in Water Splash, Inc. v. Menon that the Hague Service Convention does not prohibit service of process by mail. The purpose of The Hague Service Convention is to simplify, standardize and generally improve the process of serving documents abroad. The court analyzed the text of Article 10(a), which [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist James P. Rudolph discusses the consequences of waiting for North Korea to use its nuclear weapons … North Korea’s ambition to acquire nuclear weapons is a threat not only to Asia but to the United States as well. Kim Jong-Un, the despotic and unstable leader of North Korea, appears hell-bent on testing, [...]

The human rights situation in Belarus has seen a dramatic deterioration, according to a report published Monday from Miklos Haraszti, the UN Special Rapporteur on Belarus. The report notes numerous instances of rights abuses, beginning with the suppression of peaceful protests in March over a law imposing a tax on people who are not employed [...]

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced on Sunday that the state of emergency temporarily placed on the country after last year’s failed coup would continue until the country reached “welfare and peace.” The state of emergency gives Erdoğan and his cabinet nearly unlimited power as it allows them to make policy decisions without parliamentary oversight [...]