The UN Working Group on business and human rights on Thursday urged Canada to address human rights abuses resulting from business activities, both domestic and international. The experts, after a 10-day trip to Canada, specifically referred to human rights abuses taking place in countries where Canadian corporations practice business and the usage of indigenous people’s [...]

John Knox, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, urged all governments Thursday to fulfill their existent obligations to protect the world’s biological diversity from extinction. Knox warned: The extinction of species and the loss of microbial diversity undermines our rights to life and health by destroying potential sources for new medicines [...]

Christina Strickland, represented by Lambda Legal Counsel , filed an appeal on Thursday to the Mississippi Supreme Court to challenge a lower court’s ruling that she is not a legal parent of her ex-wife’s sons. The children were conceived with sperm from a donor while the couple was together , although their marriage was not [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said Thursday that Egypt’s new NGO law will further restrict human rights advocacy. Law 70, which was passed on May 24, 2017, requires NGO’s to be approved by a government agency, for civil society groups to report all information on their funding and activities to [...]

US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that the US will no longer be part of the Paris climate accord . 195 nations have signed on to the deal making it a world-wide effort to curb global warming. Foreign leaders, business executive and Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump , campaigned against withdrawal. Trump contested the climate [...]

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine filed suit Wednesday against five major drug manufacturers for misleading marketing practices that led to a painkiller epidemic. DeWine filed suit in the Ross County Court of Common Pleas against the manufacturers of drugs such as OxyContin, Percocet, Dilaudid and Percoda, alleging that the companies spent $168 million on sales [...]

Governor Kate Brown signed a bill on Wednesday that allows for transgender Oregonians to make updates to their birth certificates without publicly doing so through the court system. Before the legislation, amendments to document concerning people’s names and genders were required to be publicly posted by the courts. The new bill also allows for changed [...]

The State Assembly of California approved the Immigrant Worker Protection Act on Wednesday in an effort to protect against workplace raids from ICE. The bill, AB 450 , would prohibit California employers from allowing immigration agents to enter a workplace or to view their employees’ files without a subpoena or a warrant. Furthermore, the bill [...]

California senators approved a bill in a 26-12 vote on Wednesday that will add a third gender option to state IDs for people who identify as non-binary. The bill will next pass to the Assembly and, if approved, will need to be signed by Governor Jerry Brown . Should Brown sign the bill, California will [...]

A Bahrain court on Wednesday dissolved a major political party that has opposed the current government, an act that Amnesty International said is a step towards total suppression of human rights. The National Democratic Action Society (Wa’ad) was dissolved after the Ministry of Justice of Bahrain accused the group of “advocating violence, supporting terrorism and [...]