Most of the time, an individual is not acting alone, but on the authority of an all-male ‘family council’

Victims include imprisoned followers of Falun Gong movement, China Tribunal says

Three decades after the crackdown, Beijing is still terrified of the movement and what it stood for.

Reuters has learned Vice President Mike Pence is asserting quiet but unmistakable influence over a sweeping White House push to use health policy to restrict access to abortion and contraception, both in the United States and around the globe.

Earlier this week, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a summary of its findings on the state of Alabama’s prisons. The accounts are stomach-churning: The New York Times noted that one prisoner had been lying dead for so long that “his face was flattened,” while another “was tied up and tortured for two days.” A dive into the 53-page report reveals yet more horror. One prisoner was doused with bleach and beaten with a broken mop handle. Another was attacked with shaving cream so hot that it caused chemical burns, requiring treatment from an outside hospital.

Sport is a special domain, but it is not immune from the law and human rights. We're yet to see if the United Nations Human Rights Council will take further steps following this new ruling.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) spoke with New Yorkers about her efforts in Congress to increase access to affordable housing at a town hall in the Bronx Thursday evening. Housing, she says, should be legislated as a human right. “What does that mean? It means that our access and our guarantee to having a home comes before someone else’s privilege to earn a profit,” said Ocasio-Cortez.

China’s campaign against its minority Uighur population is a campaign of ethnic cleansing justified by “war on terror” rhetoric.

I may be locked up in solitary confinement, but I stand with the men and women rejecting modern slavery in America

The founder of a global abortion-pill provider that has never shipped to the U.S. has quietly started a new service for Americans. By Olga Khazan.

Slavery still exists and it happens in plain sight.

State Department official Scott Busby told senators this week that China has detained at least 800,000 Muslim minorities in internment camps. 

Iranian activist Reza Khandan, the husband of imprisoned human-rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, has been released from custody in Iran, his lawyer said in a post on Facebook on December 23. Lawyer Mohammad Moghimi wrote that following Khandan's release, both Sotoudeh and activist Farhad Meysami ended hunger strikes that were partially motivated by support for Khandan.

Often aided and inspired by social media, an increasing number of young Saudi women are taking enormous gambles to escape the country, rights groups say.

The Russian republic of Chechnya has launched a new crackdown on gays in which at least two people have died and about 40 people have been detained, LGBT activists in Russia charged Monday. The new allegations come after reports in 2017 of more than 100 gay men arrested and subjected to torture, and some of them killed, in the predominantly Muslim region in southern Russia.

The Constitution guarantees poor defendants a lawyer. It doesn’t say the lawyer will have enough time to actually work their cases.

The statement follows the reported death in a camp of a prominent musician from the Uighur minority.

Dozens of countries on Thursday issued a rare and stinging rebuke of Saudi Arabia's treatment of detained activists, including imprisoned women’s rights campaigners. "We express significant concerns about reports of continuing arrests and arbitrary detention of human rights defenders in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia," according to a statement backed by a total of 36 nations — including all 28 members of the European Union.

A prominent Iranian human rights lawyer has been sentenced to a total of 38 years in jail and 148 lashes in Tehran, her family say. Nasrin Sotoudeh was charged with several national security-related offences, all of which she denies. Rights groups strongly criticised the "shocking" sentence against the award-winning human rights activist. Ms Sotoudeh is known for representing women who have protested having to wear the headscarf.

While Western world is crazy about so called “religious rights”, China uses quite straightforward methods to fight Islam. One million Muslims are being held right now in Chinese internment camps, according to estimates cited by the UN and U.S. officials. Former inmates — most of whom are Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic minority — have told reporters that over the course of several months, they were forced to renounce Islam, criticize their own Islamic beliefs and those of fellow inmates, eat pork and drink alcohol.

9 Brunei-owned luxury hotels have suddenly disappeared from social media following widespread protests against anti-LGBT laws.

A jailed and pregnant mentally ill woman was forced to deliver her child alone in an “isolation cell” last month as corrections officers ignored her cries for help, Broward County’s public defender charged on Friday. In a letter to Broward Sheriff Gregory Tony, Public Defender Howard Finkelstein wrote that North Broward Bureau jail inmate Tammy Jackson began complaining to staffers of contractions at 3:16 a.m. on April 10. By 10 a.m., he said she was lying in her cell by herself holding her newborn daughter.

Saudi Arabia must halt a “disturbing” rise in its use of the death penalty, Amnesty International said this evening after six people were executed in the country today.

The father of a Cub Scout sat his son on his lap late last week and told him news that tore up both their hearts: The family was leaving the Boy Scouts.

Geneva: A United Nations human rights watchdog has accused Israel’s police and military of abuses against Palestinian children ranging from torture to threats of death and sexual assault in prisons.

Thailand ranks next-to-worst in the State Department's "trafficking in persons" report.

The United Nations has called on the international community to strengthen efforts to combat human trafficking, saying 2.4 million people worldwide are victims of human trafficking at any one time.

Dozens of suspected people-traffickers have been arrested in Spain and France, suspected of smuggling Chinese migrants into Europe and US, police have said.

By Bernard Vaughan NEW YORK (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ruled on Monday the New York Police Department's "stop-and-frisk" crime-fighting tactic unconstitutional, dealing a stinging rebuke to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who vowed to appeal the ruling. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin called it "indirect racial profiling" because it targeted racially defined groups...

Asylum seekers have been banned from using a swimming pool, attending churches or reading in the library under a new Swiss policy that authorities say is intended to promote peaceful coexistence with local people.

My best friend at 9 was white - but interracial friendships later became a struggle. Here's why everything changed.

Two female Russian athletes kissed on the winners podium to protest Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law, reports Sky News. Kseniya Ryzhova and Tatyana Firova kissed after they helped their team win the 4 x 400 meter relay at the World Athletics Championship in Moscow on Saturday.

Ousted Hosni Mubarak is to be released from prison within 48 hours, his lawyer claims, as Egypt descends further into chaos.

Officials from the British intelligence agency GCHQ raided The Guardian's offices to destroy hard drives related to the newspaper's stories about National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden — despite the fact that the information had already been disseminated to other sites around the world.

New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie on Monday signed into law a measure to prevent therapists from counseling gay and lesbian youths to change their sexual orientation, making his the second U.S. state to ban so-called conversion therapy.