Media Coverage

A protest organized by the Hezbollah group against the judge leading the inquiry into the Beirut port blast, Judge Tarek Bitar, broke out in heavy gunfire that left at least six people dead and wounded dozens more. Hezbollah and its allies accuse the judge of singling out politicians for questioning...

Sierra Leone became the 23 rd African country and 110 th worldwide to abolish the death penalty. President Julius Maada Bio, who signed the bill into law, said that the West African country and former British colony had “exorcised horrors of a cruel past” after a long campaign to end capital...

A 100-year-old man on trial for his alleged role as a Nazi SS guard at a concentration camp during World War II, Josef Schuetz, has told a German court he is innocent. Schuetz is charged with 3,518 counts of accessory murder at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. He allegedly worked at...

A probe into the catastrophic Beirut port explosion has been frozen for a second time after two politicians wanted for questioning filed a new complaint against the lead investigator, Judge Tarek Bitar. Bitar sought to question powerful people in Lebanon on criminal negligence charges related to...

A report by UN human rights chief Michele Bachelet finds some progress has been made in the human rights situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). However, the report finds extensive violations and abuses continue unabated in North Kivu and Ituri provinces. UN Deputy High Commissioner for...

Patrick Ball’s nonprofit, Human Rights Data Analysis Group, will be awarded the Rafto Prize, a Norwegian award bestowed on defenders of human rights around the world. Ball and his team have been called in during or after conflict to examine human rights abuses in a long list of countries from...

The UN Human Rights Council voted to end the mandate of the Group of Eminent International and Regional Experts investigating war crimes in Yemen, which in 2018 had reported evidence of possible war crimes committed by all sides, including a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia. The Cairo...

Based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, German courts and investigators are taking on criminal cases that occurred outside German borders including the genocide of Iraq’s Yazidi minority and torture in Syria’s prisons. According to a Syrian lawyer in Germany Joumana Seif, Syrians have...

The UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution to have a special rapporteur working on the ground in Afghanistan to probe violations carried out by the Taliban. Actions directed against women and girls are of primary concern. UN experts in legal analysis, forensics, and women’s rights will support...