The United Nations Human Rights Council Friday adopted a resolution deploring the removal of the democratically elected government of Myanmar by a military coup and called for its restoration. The Council called upon Myanmar’s military, which took control of the country on February 1, to refrain from violence and to protect the human rights of [...]
Angola’s revised penal code that not only decriminalizes same-sex relationships but also bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, went into effect on Wednesday. The penal code was approved by the Angolan parliament in 2019 but was not signed into law by President João Lourenço until November 2020 and was scheduled to take effect [...]
Three student loan borrowers Monday filed a petition to try to force the servicing arm of loan giant Navient into bankruptcy. The three plaintiffs all claim that their own student loan debts were discharged through their own bankruptcies, but they accuse Navient of attempting for the last decade to get them to repay the already-discharged [...]
A letter signed by 144 constitutional law scholars and circulated Friday characterizes as “legally frivolous” ex-president Donald Trump’s First Amendment-based defense in his impeachment trial slated to start in the US Senate on February 9. The scholars contend that it does not matter whether Trump was engaged in lawful speech when he spoke prior to [...]
US President Joe Biden issued a memorandum Thursday directing US federal agencies that are engaged abroad to “promote and protect the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons.” The memorandum states that it is building on a similar memorandum issued by President Obama in 2011, when Biden was serving as his vice-president. The Biden memorandum directs agencies [...]
In a unanimous decision on Wednesday, the US Supreme Court ruled that the heirs of Jewish art dealers cannot bring a lawsuit in US courts against Germany over the alleged forced sale of art and artifacts under the Nazi regime. The case, Federal Republic of Germany v. Philipp, concerned a trove of medieval Christian relics [...]
The parliament of Portugal voted on Friday to legalize euthanasia, which, if signed into law, would make it the seventh country in the world to do so. The vote was 136-78 with four abstentions in favor of approving the bill, which would allow people over the age of 18 who are in extreme suffering or [...]
A Montana federal district court judge on Wednesday ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) implementation of a rule published in the waning days of the Trump Administration. Judge Brian Morris held that the rule could not take immediate effect because the agency had violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) in determining the rule could [...]
The Thai Senate on Monday voted to amend the criminal code by allowing early term abortions. The criminal code previously criminalized women who had abortions, either performed by others or by the women themselves, with penalties of up to three years in prison and a 6,000 Baht fine. However, last February the Constitutional Court ruled [...]
Senate Democrats on Tuesday blocked a motion to vote on the constitutionality of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. The motion was brought to the floor by Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who raised two objections to the trial going forward. First, he noted that the Constitution says impeachment only applies to the President, Vice-President, [...]
