Human rights activists from various international organizations in late December called on Iranian President Hassan Rouhani to end the country’s persecution of LGBT Iranians in a letter citing various attacks and rights violations. The signatories of the letter, from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission and the Iranian [...]

Bytes for All (B4A) , a Pakistani human rights organization focusing on information and communication technologies, has filed suit with the UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal (ITP) against the British government for its cable-tapping program, Tempora. B4A is partnered with Privacy International , which filed a similar suit last July. B4A’s claim states that the UK’s [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York approved a deal on Wednesday between the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and JPMorgan Chase to settle the criminal charges of failure to report suspicions about Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. The prosecution entered a deferred prosecution [...]

A French court in Aix-En Province order the extradition of Mukhtar Ablyazov , Kazakhstan’s former energy minister accused of misappropriating $6 billion from BTA Bank . The French court agreed to the extradition requests from Russia and Ukraine, which both house BTA Bank branches, partly because France does not have an extradition agreement with Kazakhstan. [...]

The Islamabad Special Court on Thursday ordered the former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf to appear at a hearing on January 16 despite his lawyers’ position that he is too sick to attend. According to court registrar Abdul Ghani Soomro, the judges have examined Musharraf’s medical report submitted by the hospital and have concluded that Musharraf [...]

Three courts in Egypt sentenced 113 supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood on Thursday. In one of the largest mass trials to date, 63 individuals were sentenced to three years in prison on charges of rioting, thuggery and weapons possession stemming from protest in Cairo in November. The sentence includes [...]

The Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertes (CNIL) , an independent data protection oversight authority set up by the French government, has fined Google €150,000 after Google failed to act upon CNIL’s order to bring Google’s methods tracking and storing user information into compliance with French data privacy law . CNIL has ordered Google [...]

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced during his State of the State address on Wednesday plans for a medical marijuana pilot program which would permit up to 20 hospitals to distribute medical marijuana to patients with serious illnesses. Cuomo’s plan states that the pilot program “will allow qualified eligible participants to seek relief for their [...]

The office of Utah Governor Gary Herbert on Tuesday sent an e-mail to state Cabinet members, directing them to place legal recognition of same-sex marriages within the state on hold until further notice . This directive comes as a result of Monday’s decision by the US Supreme Court to temporarily block the issuance of same-sex [...]

Chaloka Beyani, UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, on Wednesday urged the international community to assist the approximately one million individuals who have been internally displaced by the ongoing violence in the Central African Republic (CAR) , by providing necessary resources to them. Beyani noted that the number of displaced [...]