Responding to mounting actions by President Pierre Nkurunziza , UN human rights experts condemned on Monday governmental hostility towards non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and human rights defenders. The UN Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights report cites numerous suspensions, including rights organization Ligue ITEKA and governance organization OLUFAD, as part of a troubling pattern [...]

Missouri Governor Eric Greitens signed a bill into law on Monday, making Missouri the most recent right to work state. The law, which will go into effect August 28, prevents employers from requiring union membership or dues to support a union as a condition of employment, making it a misdemeanor to do so. Missouri will [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Margaret Hu of Washington and Lee University School of Law, discusses President Trump’s break from post-WWII precedent on refugee policy … As “leader of the free world,” every post-World War II US President has expressed some form of public support for refugees through speeches and White House statements. With the refugee crisis [...]

JURIST Guest Kübra Berberoğlu, Oxford Human Rights Law Reporter (OxHRLR), discusses how, in the case of B.L. v. Australia, the HRC has made either a careless or a disappointing start in clarifying how it employs the internal relocation alternative and how this might negatively affect refugee protection under the ICCPR. A longer version of this [...]

Deutsche See, an environmentally conscious fish distributor, became Volkswagen’s first major German customer to sue VW over misrepresenting their vehicles as being environmentally friendly. Deutsche See’s complaint alleged “malicious deception” and was filed at the regional court in Braunschweig, near Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg headquarters. Deutsche See, which leases 500 vehicles from VW, stated that it “only [...]

According to the annual UN report , civilian casualties in Afghanistan for 2016 were at a record high. A total of 3,498 civilians were killed and 7,920 were wounded. Of the dead, 923 were children , as were 2,589 of the injured. The report also documents that the Taliban caused almost two-thirds of the casualties [...]

A Hungarian court in Gyor ordered a retria on Monday over the 2010 toxic red sludge spill that killed ten people in one of the country’s worst environmental disasters. Judge Csilla Zolyomi said that there had been procedural errorsl in the hearing of witnesses and in the court’s justification for acquittal. Monday’s ruling is not [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) called Monday for the government of Myanmar to “urgently endorse an independent, international investigation into alleged abuses” against the Rohingya Muslim population, including sexual violence against Rohingya women and girls. According to survivor testimony, the Myanmar army and members of the Border Guard Police “took part in rape, gang rape, invasive [...]

Saudi Arabia has intensified its arrests and convictions of human rights advocates and dissenting writers in 2017, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Monday. In January a Saudi court sentenced two human rights activists to long prison terms following allegations of contact with international human rights organizations and media. Two other men, Ahmed al-Musheikhis and [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Fahira Brodlija of The University of Pittsburgh School of Law, LLM Class of 2017, discusses the implications of revising a lawsuit between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia…According to the former prosecutor of The Hague International Criminal Court (ICC), Geoffrey Nice, there is new evidence based on which Bosnia and Herzegovina could seek [...]