Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on Tuesday urged the government to move from “apology to action” in its policies and programs directed toward restoring the aboriginal peoples’ relationships with the rest of the country. The TRC interviewed more than 7,000 individuals to track a six-year timeline of abuse and neglect of the aboriginal peoples, [...]

Authorities in Egypt on Tuesday announced the arrest of two leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo’s Gaza district after they were both convicted and sentenced to death in absentia. Mahmoud Ghozlan and Abdul Rahman al-Barr were part of the brotherhood’s highest office, the Guidance Bureau, and the organization condemned the arrests . Authorities announced [...]

A Guantanamo detainee has alleged that the CIA’s torture techniques went beyond those described in last year’s Senate Intelligence Committee report, Reuters reported Tuesday. Majid Khan was detained in Pakistan in 2003 and confessed to delivering money to al Qaeda used for a bombing in Jakarta that killed 11 people. He also admitted to planning [...]

A judge for the Quebec Superior Court has awarded over $15 billion (USD $12 billion) in damages to Quebec smokers in a case against tobacco companies JTI-Macdonald, Imperial Tobacco, and Rothmans, Benson & Hedges, making this the largest award for damages and the biggest class action lawsuit in Canada’s history. In a ruling made public [...]

The US Senate approved the USA Freedom Act on Tuesday, which reduces the federal government’s surveillance of Americans’ phone records. Shortly after the approval, President Barack Obama signed the measure into law, stating : y Administration will work expeditiously to ensure our national security professionals again have the full set of vital tools they need [...]

The UN Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Somalia, Bahame Tom Mukirya Nyanduga, on Monday urged the government of Somalia to continue working to increase human rights protections . Bahame Nyanduga stressed the importance of protecting freedom of expression, noting that, “Somali journalists are often harassed, arrested, censored, even imprisoned, and media [...]

A Hungarian appeals court on Monday ordered the retrial of Bela Biszku , a high-ranking leader of the Hungarian Communist Party, who was convicted for war crimes following the 1956 uprising . The intermediate court found that the verdict rendered at trial was “unfounded” and “not suitable for revision” due to errors in the lower [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Ibrahim Fares discusses the challenges surrounding the adoption of the Secured Transaction Draft Law in Palestine… Recently the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a part of World Bank Group, finished the final draft of the Secured Transaction Draft Law (STL) in cooperation with the Palestinian Ministry of National Economy and other related parties. [...]

The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine released its tenth report on Monday, documenting the serious human rights abuses that persist in eastern Ukraine. The violations include “shelling, executions, arbitrary and illegal detentions, torture, ill-treatment, human trafficking and the lack of justice and accountability, as well as deprivation of economic and social rights.” While [...]

South Korea and China on Monday signed a bilateral free trade agreement that will eliminate most tariffs between the two countries over the next two decades. After approximately three years of negotiations, Chinese Commerce Minister Gao Hucheng and South Korean Trade Minister Yoon Sang-jick signed the agreement in Seoul, South Korea, which will remove tariffs [...]