The California Senate passed legislation Tuesday that, if approved by the state assembly, would create an agency to implement policies and facilitate reparations for descendants of chattel slaves, while also authorizing the compensation of Black families whose land was seized under the state’s eminent domain power. S.B. 1403 would stop short of appropriating state funds for the reparations and would instead focus on creating administrative infrastructure for such a program while S.B. 1050 would address restitution for “racially motivated uses” of eminent domain. The California American Freedme ..read more

Free speech organization Article 19 released its 2024 Global Expression Report (GER) on Tuesday showing that more than half of the world’s population is “living through a freedom of expression crisis,” unable to speak freely. In 2023, the percentage of people living in this crisis rose to 53 percent, or about 4 billion people. This dramatic shift is largely attributed to India, which was officially designated as a country in crisis in the report. The country has experienced a 35-point drop over the last decade. According to Reporters Without Borders, “India’s media has fallen into an ‘unoffici ..read more

In an open letter, over 50 civil society organizations urged the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to ensure that any forfeited assets from its landmark case against Lafarge S.A. and Lafarge Cement Syria S.A. are directed to to support victims and survivors of underlying atrocity crimes associated with Syria on Wednesday. The letter expressed grave concerns that money from the case may not directly assist the victims of the industrial company’s actions and they urged Merrick Garland, US Attorney General, to ensure these funds go to those affected. Lafarge S.A, a French building materials manufact ..read more

Amnesty International UK criticised the House of Lords on Wednesday for their failure to strike down clauses in a vote earlier in the week, which strip away human rights protections for prisoners. They have warned of a “sinister trend” of human rights being “switched off, ” with prisoners being the latest group to be targeted. The Victims and Prisoners Bill, first introduced in March 2023, seeks to address and improve support for victims of crime, including the appointment of specialist advocates, as well as reforms of the parole system, placing restrictions on the early release of dangerous o ..read more

30,000 Taiwanese demonstrators surrounded the Legislative Yuan, the island’s parliament, on Tuesday protesting against the legislative majority’s attempts to enact new laws by allegedly violating procedural justice and the island’s constitution. The controversies surround two bills, the parliamentary reform and a transport network bill, with a proposed cost of nearly $62 billion, equal to the island’s annual expenditure. The controversy surrounding the bill regards a possible violation of committee autonomy.  The legislative majority, comprising the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Part ..read more

The UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights heard expert evidence on recent European Court of Human Rights judgments surrounding climate change and its relevance to human rights on Wednesday. While the meeting particularly emphasised the effects these judgments will have on the UK, the experts also discussed the contents of climate-related judgments and their impacts on the rule of law. The committee cut off the public meeting due to time constraints, but further position papers are expected from the experts. Particularly of note was the 2024 Veirein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others ..read more

Thailand’s National Museum hosted a welcome-home ceremony on Tuesday for two ancient statues illegally trafficked from Thailand by a British antiquities collector and returned from the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met). The 129-centimeter statue called the “Golden Boy” was long thought to be a Hindu statue of Shiva. However, archaeologist Tanongsak Hanwong claims: The Golden Boy is more similar in style to the carvings found at the Phimai stone castle. This suggests that the artifact is a sculpture of King Jayavarman VI (1080 to 1107 AD) of the Mahidharapura Dynasty, w ..read more

Rudy Giuliani, former lawyer for Donald Trump and erstwhile Mayor of New York, pleaded not guilty Tuesday in an Arizona election interference case regarding a false slate of electors submitted in the 2020 Presidential election. Giuliani, along with ten others, was charged with counts of tampering with a public record, forgery, and changing vote of an elector by corrupt means or inducement. The other defendants included Kelli Ward, Tyler Bowyer, Nancy Cottle, Jacob Hoffman, Anthony Kern, James Lamon, Robert Montgomery, Samuel Moorhead, Loraine Pellegrino, Gregory Safsten, Michael Ward, John Eas ..read more

The Delhi High Court rejected Tuesday former Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia’s bail pleas in relation to the money laundering and corruption allegations made by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), both in connection with the Delhi excise policy scam case. The bench, led by Justice Swarana Kanta Sharma, ruled that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader’s request for bail was not justified at this stage. The court emphasised that the AAP leader had not presented sufficient evidence to support his case, stating further: Corruption, in this case, origina ..read more

The Netherlands will no longer allow its citizens to adopt children internationally, the Minister for Legal Protection Franc Weerwind wrote on Tuesday. With this decision the minister responds to the motion passed by the Dutch House of Representatives in which the government was requested to come up with a plan to carefully reduce international adoptions. The motion was passed for diverse reasons. The Dutch House of Representatives seriously doubted if it would be possible to design a realistic public law system in which abuses of the system could no longer occur. Several malpractices came to ..read more