The European Council in its special meeting on Tuesday elected Belgian Charles Michel as its president. He will serve a once renewable two and a half year term beginning 1 December 2019 until 31 May 2022. The council also considered nominees for other positions and defined its own role in nominating and appointing high profile [...]

In a court filing released on Wednesday, Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt indicated that the Department of Justice will explore new ways to ask whether responders to the 2020 census are citizens of the US. The Supreme Court ruled on the citizenship question last week. It left in place a lower court’s decision to block [...]

The Committee on Ways and Means of the Democratic-led House of Representatives filed a lawsuit on Tuesday against the Department of the Treasury and the IRS, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig, seeking disclosure of President Trump’s tax return information. According to the complaint, Section 6103(f) of the Internal Revenue Code requires [...]

The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Belarus, Anaïs Marin, released a report Tuesday claiming that Belarus continues to commit human rights and fundamental freedom violations. Human Rights Council Resolution A/HRC/20/13, passed during the Council’s 20th session in 2012, mandated the Special Rapporteur to monitor the situation in Belarus and assist [...]

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled late last week that a lawsuit against a student loan servicer based on state consumer protection and fraud laws is not preempted by federal law. The lawsuit was originally filed by a borrower who relied on the student loan provider’s claim that it had “expert [...]

A group of Second Amendment advocates, including the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Calguns Foundation, filed a complaint Tuesday in the United States District Court Southern District of California seeking to have California Penal Code Section 27510 declared unconstitutional. California Governor Jerry Brown signed Section 27510, which raised the minimum age to purchase a gun [...]

San Francisco became the first city in the US to outlaw the sale, distribution, and manufacturing of e-cigarettes when the city’s Mayor London Breed signed a unanimously passed ordinance on Friday. The ordinance states that “no person shall sell or distribute an electronic cigarette to a person in San Francisco” that has not undergone a [...]

The ACLU and other rights groups filed a lawsuit on Friday immediately after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new law that requires people with felony convictions to pay all court fees and fines to be eligible to vote. In November 2018, Florida passed a monumental constitutional amendment that restored voting rights to more than [...]

The House Committee on Natural Resources sent the World Wide Fund’s US branch a demand letter on Monday requesting internal documents for an ongoing investigation that seeks to determine if the US government funded anti-poaching organizations that committed human rights violations. A BuzzFeed investigation revealed that the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the world’s [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) filed a submission on Qatar with the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on Monday in preparation for the committee’s upcoming meeting and review of Qatar’s progress. The committee is charged with monitoring women’s progress in states that signed the 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination [...]