Human rights groups Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday issued a joint letter to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) calling for the creation of a special prosecutor to investigate claims that Central Intelligence Agency agents used torture against detainees held at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere. The [...]

London’s Metropolitan Police announced Tuesday that it has arrested Rwanda National Intelligence and Security Services head Karenzi Karake on an international warrant for war crimes. The European Arrest Warrant was issued in 2008 by Spanish High Court Judge Fernando Andreu for Karake’s alleged role in the 1997 killings of three Spanish aid workers. The Rwandan [...]

China’s anti-corruption Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI) on Tuesday announced the launch of investigations into 26 government agencies and state-owned-enterprises (SOEs). The entities to be investigated include People’s Daily Newspaper , Anshan Iron and Steel, conglomerate China Resources, the Ministry of Transport and National Railway Administration. In the announcement , the CCDI said the [...]

UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein announced Tuesday the opening of a UN office to specifically monitor human rights in North Korea (DPRK). The UN Human Rights Office (Seoul) will be located in Seoul, South Korea. It is tasked with outreach, technical cooperation with member states, monitoring human rights violations, and [...]

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic released a report Tuesday stating that both government troops and opposition rebels are targeting civilians in Syria’s civil war.The report says that the government intentionally targets areas in which civilians regularly congregate, such as marketplaces and bus stations and that it has failed [...]

The State Administrative Court of Jakarta on Monday denied the clemency appeal of a French citizen sentenced to death on a drug trafficking charge. The appeal of Serge Atlaoui was an effort to reverse the original clemency denial made by President Joko Widodo last year. The country has received significant criticism for its use of [...]

The Supreme Court of North Korea on Tuesday sentenced two South Korean men to indefinite labor on subversion charges, according to the Korean Central News Agency of North Korea. Kim Kuk Gi and Choe Chun Gil were found guilty of spying for South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) . They were further convicted of conspiracy [...]

The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights on Monday released a report calling on Ireland to “take all necessary steps, including a referendum on abortion, to revise its legislation on abortion.” The committee expressed grave concern over Ireland’s criminalization of abortion even in cases of rape, and it believed that its recommendations would [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday granted certiorari in Kingdomware Technologies v. United States , a case that deals with the rights of small-business-owning veterans to receive benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) . In 2006, Congress passed a bill that states the VA “shall” award contracts to veteran-owned small businesses if at [...]

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon on Monday announced the appointment of an independent panel to review the organization’s handling of allegations that French and African soldiers sexually abused children in the Central African Republic from December 2013 to June 2014. The panel will be led by Marie Deschamps , a former justice on the Supreme [...]