Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday that it has strong evidence the Syrian government used chemical weapons on three rebel-held towns in Northern Syria last month. The announcement reveals results of a two-week investigation by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) into the alleged chemical warfare. HRW asserts that evidence strongly [...]

The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled on Tuesday that people can request that search engines remove links to certain websites containing their personal information. In an advisory judgment, the court held that search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing must sometimes comply with individuals’ requests to web pages or newspapers with [...]

An Israeli trial court on Tuesday sentenced former prime minister Ehud Olmert to six years in prison for his role in a bribery scandal while serving as mayor of Jerusalem. The Tel Aviv District Court ruled that Olmert was guilty of participating in a corrupt real estate deal in the 1990s involving the Holyland Towers [...]

Five same-sex couples on Monday challenged Alaska’s constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Alaska , contends that the amendment , added to the Alaska Constitution in 1998, violates their due process and equal protection rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. Four [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report on Monday finding that the use of fully autonomous weapons by militaries or law enforcement would be an affront to basic human rights and should be preemptively banned by international convention. The report, entitled “Shaking the Foundations: The Human Rights Implications of Killer Robots,” was jointly authored by [...]

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Monday ordered Turkey to pay €90 million (USD $123 million) to Cyprus for invading the island in 1974. Thirty million euros are to be paid in damages to relatives of the missing, and €60 million have been allocated for residents of the Karpas peninsula. Speaking on the [...]

The office of Russian President Vladimir Putin has declared that it does not wish to annex eastern Ukraine where “self-rule” referendums have overwhelmingly supported secession, but called on the Kiev government to open dialogue with the separatists. The referendums, organized by pro-Russian insurgents in Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, claim a vote [...]

The Indonesian Constitutional Court (MK) on Monday established three panels to review disputes regarding the country’s April 9 legislative elections. The MK and the General Elections Commission (KPU) formed the panels in expectation of challenges to the election results, announced by the KPU on May 9, including accusations of electoral fraud. The Indonesian Democratic Party [...]

The lawyer for the Pakistani doctor who helped the US find Osama bin Laden said on Sunday that he would no longer represent him after receiving threats from militants. Lawyer Samiullah Khan Afridi told the Associated Press (AP) that he made the decision after he received a “final” warning from militants. Afridi had been representing [...]

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi , the son of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi , appeared via videolink at a court in Tripoli on Sunday. Saif al-Islam and 36 other defendants are facing a variety of charges including corruption and war crimes from their alleged role in suppressing the 2011 uprising . At the trial, the [...]