Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday released a report criticizing Turkey’s emergency decrees have weakened human rights safeguards, resulting in at least 13 instances of abuse including sexual abuse, beatings and sleep deprivation. Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia HRW director, warned: “by removing safeguards against torture, the Turkish government effectively wrote a blank check [...]

The UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID) on Monday called on all governments to make a concerted effort to fight against enforced disappearances. Noting the increasing prevalence of disappearances, Houria Es Slami , head of the working group, said “every year we make similar calls expressing serious concern about the persistence of [...]

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta on Monday commuted the sentences of all death row inmates to life in prison. The last execution in Kenya took place in 1987, though there were 2,655 male and 92 female death row inmates at the time of the commutations . He also invoked the constitutional Power of Mercy to pardon [...]

The UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a report on Tuesday documenting the systemic discrimination of minorities in Myanmar and calling for concrete steps end these human rights violations. The report focused on particular concern of the treatment of Rohingya Muslims in the Rakhine region. The Rohingya face restrictions of [...]

A federal judge on Monday issued a preliminary injunction blocking Michigan Secretary of State Ruth Johnson from enforcing a ban against “ballot selfies” on election day. The state statute made the act of posting and displaying one’s ballot a misdemeanor offense, thereby prohibiting state residents from taking pictures of ballots for social media. Earlier this [...]

The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on Monday called on the US government to “abolish the mandatory detention of migrants, especially asylum seekers, from all countries.” The working group stated that mandatory detention was a violation of international law standards. The group urged US authorities to ensure individual assessment for detention of asylum seekers, [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Monday ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) acted reasonably when it proposed to list certain populations of bearded seals in Alaska as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act . Designation of the animal as threatened gives bearded seals the lower of two levels [...]

A Pennsylvania judge on Monday sentenced former attorney general Kathleen Kane to 10 to 23 months in jail after she was found guilty of perjury and abusing her position. Kane resigned from office in August after being convicted of leaking grand jury materials to discredit a political opponent and lying about her actions under oath. [...]

Popular services like Snapchat and Skype are falling short on privacy protections for their users , Amnesty International (AI) said in a new report . The report, released Friday, ranked the 11 companies that provide the most popular services, including Facebook and Apple. The analysis gave the companies a rating between 0 and 100 based [...]

According to a report on Monday, the Burundi Interior Ministry issued an order last week withdrawing permits from a prominent human rights group and four other non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The Association for the Protection of Human Rights and Detained Persons (APRODH) , a major human rights group in the area, as well as the other [...]