Tanzanian officials on Sunday suspended another newspaper accused of false stories, despite President Samia Suluhu Hassan pledging to uphold the media freedoms that had been revoked by her predecessor, the late John Pombe Magufuli. The newspaper, Raia Mwema (which translates to Good Citizen), is a leading weekly Swahili newspaper that has been suspended for 30 [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Monday urged UN human rights experts to lead independent investigations into enforced disappearances by security officers in Bangladesh. HRW’s report, “‘Where No Sun Can Enter’: A Decade of Enforced Disappearances in Bangladesh,” urged top UN officials, donors, and trade partners, to step up measures to hold senior Bangladesh security forces [...]
France’s competition regulator, fined Google €500 million Tuesday for failing to negotiate “in good faith” with media companies over the use of their content under EU copyright rules. Google had openly disregarded several injunctions issued in April 2020 by displaying snippets of articles on its Google News service. The authority ordered Google to present a [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) called Tuesday for an investigation into the UN for improperly collecting data and sharing personal information from the Rohingya refugees with Bangladesh, which shared the information with Myanmar, their country of origin. The UN is accused of failing to conduct a full data impact assessment, which is a requirement set by [...]
A special five-judge bench at the High Court of Kenya on Thursday declared the Building Bridges Initiative (BBI)-driven Constitution of Kenya Amendment Bill 2020 unconstitutional. The main case was filed by five activists, namely David Ndii, Jerotich Seii, James Ngondi, Wanjiku Gikonyo, and Ikal Angelei. The judgment deals with 17 issues that had been raised in eight [...]
The government of Kenya revealed Sunday that it had pulled out of the maritime border case with Somalia just a few hours before the scheduled virtual hearing before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netherlands. In a letter to the ICJ, Kenya’s Attorney General argued that the COVID-19 pandemic struck right after [...]
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Tuesday issued an interim measure asking the government of Russia to release political activist and opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was recently sentenced to three-and-a-half years for violating his parole. The ECHR’s ruling was rejected by Russian authorities, including the Minister of Justice and the Press Secretary [...]
UN human rights experts expressed grave concern Monday over Thailand’s increasingly severe use of lèse-majesté laws to curtail criticism of the monarchy, singling out a 43-year sentence for an elderly woman convicted for insulting the royal family. Anchan Preelert, a 60-year-old former civil servant, was on January 19 last year handed what is viewed as [...]
The UN Human Rights Committee in Geneva Tuesday found that the Netherlands violated a child’s rights by failing to acknowledge that Denny Zhao, a child born 2010 in the Dutch city of Utrecht, was stateless and therefore eligible for international protections under the UN. The Committee further urged the country to change its legislation with [...]
The US Supreme Court announced Friday that they have agreed to weigh in on the legality of the Trump administration’s approval of Medicaid work requirements in Arkansas and New Hampshire. The justices consolidated the cases of Azar v. Gresham and Arkansas v. Gresham for one hour of oral argument. Residents of Kentucky and Arkansas had [...]
