Amnesty International on Wednesday called on Shell plc to answer for decades of pollution in the Niger Delta following release of a report detailing how oil pollution has damaged water, farmland, fisheries, health and livelihoods, while the company continued to profit and deny responsibility. The report, titled “Nigeria: Lifting the Lid: Internal documents expose Shell’s [...]

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Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

British Labour MP Jess Asato on Tuesday filed a request for a court order barring xAI’s Grok chatbot from generating non-consensual sexualized images of her, arguing that the chatbot completely strips women of their personal autonomy by allowing users to digitally manipulate their images without consent. She first filed the claim in June alleging that [...]

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JYB Devot, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday reported that Perenco, the sole oil producer in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is using in production methods that pose grave health and environmental threats to local communities. HRW Central Africa director Lewis Mudge stated: “The Congolese government transparency on oil pollution levels to meet its obligations to [...]

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Ousted South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol on Monday was sentenced to a suspended 18-month prison sentence by the Seoul Central District Court for lying during his 2022 campaign. Yoon was indicted over misrepresenting his connections to a fortune teller, who had connections to the controversial Unification Church, as well as lying about his connections [...]

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Tony Webster, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela called on the Venezuelan government Monday to reverse its decision to withdraw from the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC), warning that leaving the ICC would weaken accountability for serious human rights violations and limit victims’ access to justice. The Venezuelan [...]

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A UN expert warned on Tuesday that policies on border protection and migration cannot nullify the absolute ban on returning a person to torture as set out in international law. The UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Alice Jill Edwards, published a position paper on the principle [...]

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Amnesty International Malaysia on Tuesday has condemned Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s direction for authorities to take stringent measures against more than 100 Rohingya asylum seekers, who said they were forced from their homes by local residents and subsequently detained after assembling outside of the UN Refugee Agency office in the nation’s capital.  In commenting on [...]

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For the first time since Congress created it in 1996, the Justice Department has invoked the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC), a specialized tribunal that may consider classified evidence a respondent never sees, and order a noncitizen accused of terrorism removed. What the statute does not say is who decides whether that removal will deliver [...]

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Weapons that select and engage targets without a human pulling the trigger are no longer hypothetical, and the legal architecture governing who bears responsibility when they kill the wrong person has not caught up. US Department of Defense doctrine defines autonomous weapon systems (AWS) as systems that, “once activated, can select and engage targets without [...]

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UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk on Monday expressed concerns that the mass destruction and displacement caused by Israeli strikes against Lebanon could amount to international crimes. Türk spent two days in Lebanon documenting the effects of the regional war on Lebanese citizens and concluded the trip with a press conference detailing his findings. While [...]

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