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The Iranian government should immediately halt all executions for drug-related offenses while parliament debates amendments to reform the country’s drug law, Human Rights Watch said on July 20, 2017. Parliament is expected to vote in two weeks on an amendment to the drug law that would drastically increase the bar for a mandatory death penalty sentence.

The Department of Homeland Security should not expand expedited removal from the United States for asylum seekers, Human Rights Watch said on Jul 19. Plans to expand the program from its current limit of people caught within 100 miles of the border who arrived within a 14-day period to a nationwide dragnet for anyone who cannot prove they have been in the country for more than 90 days were reported on July 17, 2017, by the Washington Post based on a 13-page internal agency memo.

International observers have discovered an execution site in west Mosul, Human Rights Watch said on Jul 19. That report, combined with new statements about executions in and around Mosul’s Old City and persistent documentation about Iraqi forces extrajudicially killing men fleeing Mosul in the final phase of the battle against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), are an urgent call to action by the Iraqi government.

The agency investigating the fatal police shooting of an Australian woman in Minneapolis, Minnesota, says one of the officers was startled by a loud noise just moments before his partner fired the deadly shot.

The Director-General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, today denounced the murder of Edwin Rivera Paz, the Honduran journalist who was killed in the town Acayucan, in the Mexican state of Veracruz.

The wife of a Princeton University graduate student sentenced to 10 years in prison for espionage in Iran said Tuesday that he had been "unjustly imprisoned'' and called for his immediate release.

Tajik authorities have detained, interrogated, and threatened relatives of 10 peaceful opposition activists who took part in a conference in Germany on July 9, 2017, in retaliation for the peaceful exercise of their fundamental rights, Human Rights Watch and the Norwegian Helsinki Committee said on Jul 18.

Russia has introduced significant restrictions to online speech and invasive surveillance of online activity and prosecutes critics under the guise of fighting extremism, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Jul 18.

A group of Gambian boys survey the ocean from the beach during an outing from a government hot spot–a reception center that doubles as a lodging station for unaccompanied minors in Pozzallo, Sicily, on May 17, 2016.