Human Rights | WPN World People News

Police in black uniform moments after the shooting of Shaimaa al-Sabbagh, a political activist who later died as a result of her wounds, in Cairo, Egypt, on January 24, 2015.

“I am gravely disturbed at the execution this week, in Georgia and Texas respectively, of Warren Hill and Robert Ladd – both of whom seem to have a well-documented intellectual disability,” Marietta Karamanli (France, SOC), General rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on the abolition of the death penalty, said on January 30.

Whistleblowers from the US and the EU recounted the problems they faced in trying to expose what they believed to be wrongdoing in the organisations they worked for, testifying this week at a hearing of PACE’s Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee.

A professor who was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign because of his tweets criticizing the Israeli government’s bombing of Gaza last year has filed a civil rights suit against the University and its top officials, saying that his firing violated his First Amendment right to free speech and other constitutional rights, and basic principles of academic freedom.

A high-profile battle over whether Google must respond to an unusual and dangerous subpoena raises fundamental concerns about federal free speech law and the protections it affords hosts of online content, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued in an amicus brief filed on January 30.

UNICEF is launching a US$3.1 billion appeal – its largest ever – to reach 62 million children at risk in humanitarian crises worldwide – a US$1 billion jump in funding needs since last year’s appeal.

Photographs, videos, and witness statements strongly indicate that a member of Egypt’s security forces was responsible for fatally shooting a female protester in a downtown Cairo square on January 24, 2015, Human Rights Watch said on 1 February.

A construction crew at work in Kankan, Guinea, as part of UNDP’s efforts to ensure early recovery from the Ebola outbreak

Even as global attention fades, the humanitarian crisis in eastern Ukraine is deteriorating.

Governments make a big mistake when they ignore human rights to counter serious security challenges, Human Rights Watch said on 30 January in releasing its annual world report.