Badenoch and Farage seize on Richard Hermer’s ‘clumsy’ remark in speech made in defence of international law
The attorney general has apologised for a “clumsy” remark that compared Conservative and Reform calls to disregard international treaties and quit the European convention of human rights (ECHR) with the early days of Nazi Germany.
The UK faces “disintegration” and will become “less prosperous and secure” if it takes a pick-and-mix approach to international law, the attorney general has said.
In a speech on Thursday, Richard Hermer launched a defence of international law and multilateral frameworks which “have kept us safe since 1945”.
Report from Human Rights Watch criticises Museveni regime for arbitrary arrests and detentions, violence and extortion since draconian new law enacted
The Ugandan authorities have “unleashed abuse”, perpetrating widespread discrimination and violence against LGBTQ+ people in the two years since the world’s harshest anti-gay laws were enacted, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The government’s policies in Uganda had encouraged attacks and harassment against people and organisations seen as being supportive of gay rights, said researchers from the rights group.
Alain Berset says no judiciary should face political pressure after nine countries make intervention over migration
Europe’s leading human rights body has criticised nine governments that have urged a rethink of the interpretation of the European convention on human rights on migration issues.
The Council of Europe secretary general, Alain Berset, spoke out against “politicising” the European court of human rights after nine European leaders signed a letter organised by Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, calling for an “open-minded conversation” about the interpretation of the convention.
We conclude that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, including mass killing, arbitrary detention and torture, meets the legal threshold for the term
We are university professors and human rights advocates who teach and write about Palestine and Israel. We have collectively taught thousands of classes on human rights law, international law and government repression. We have defended death row prisoners in Malawi, documented forced labor in Brazil, helped women seeking gender equality in Burma, chronicled the struggle of the Sahrawi people for self-determination in Western Sahara, and advocated on behalf of families of disappeared immigrants in the United States. As human rights defenders, our job is to expose government abuses of power where we find them. And that includes Israel.
It has never been easy for scholars in the United States to publicly criticize Israel. Now, anyone who does so risks professional suicide. The Trump administration deliberately conflates criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism and has pressured universities to discipline students and fire faculty who express concern over the slaughter of Palestinians. This has chilled speech on our campuses and is a direct assault on academic freedom. It is also an attempt to stamp out all opposition to US foreign policy with respect to Israel.
Sandra L Babcock is a clinical professor and director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Cornell Law School. Susan M Akram is clinical professor and director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Boston University School of Law. Thomas Becker is the legal and policy director at the University Network for Human Rights and teaches human rights at Columbia Law School. James Cavallaro is the executive director of the University Network for Human Rights and a visiting professor at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs
New York Times reporter Eric Lipton (Bluesky, 5/12/25) defended his reference to lobbyists giving the Trump family millions of dollars to buy access to the president as “potentially corrupt.”
“Corruption requires explicit quid pro quo,” Lipton maintained. “It is not corrupt to take an action that aligns with the interest of a person who gives you a gift, unless the official action was in direct response to that gift—a bribe.”
Lipton was Timesplaining the legal definition of “bribery,” which has indeed been narrowed by the Supreme Court to require an explicit quid pro quo. But the president is also bound by federal laws prohibiting the solicitation of gifts (CRS, 8/16/12), and the Constitution forbids him to accept any foreign payment (or “emolument”) without congressional approval.
Moreover, “corruption” is primarily an ethical, not a legal term (SCOTUSblog, 9/25/19). Trump’s access auction certainly meets Transparency International’s definition of corruption as “the abuse of entrusted power for private gain.”
Lipton got up on his highest horse: “Terms matter. Accuracy and fairness matters. Regardless of what social media wants.” It’s hard to say what social media want, but it would be nice to have elite reporters who didn’t redefine terms to provide cover for self-enriching politicians.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Jim Naureckas.
BANGKOK – The Trump administration plan to allow mining of deep sea metals in the Pacific Ocean would unequivocally violate international law, experts said, making any attempt to sell the minerals – used in batteries, weapons and smartphones – open to challenge by other nations.
President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order to speed development of the contentious deep sea mining industry, including in off-limits international waters governed by a treaty most nations are signatory to. The order said action is needed to “counter China’s growing influence over seabed mineral resources.”
Unilateral action on deep sea mining by the U.S., legal experts said, also has the potential to weaken its legitimacy in attempting to enforce international law generally, including freedom of navigation in flashpoint waters such as the South China Sea or in combating illegal fishing.
“It is hazardous for the U.S. to throw out the rule book,” said Duncan Currie, an international lawyer, who advises conservation groups and testified to Congress last month on the risks of deep sea mining.
Foreshadowing the executive order, Nasdaq-traded The Metals Company, or TMC, which has been at the forefront of ambitions to exploit the seabed, in March applied for exploration and mining permits under the U.S. umbrella for areas in the Pacific Ocean.
It is attempting to bypass the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, a U.N. organization mandated to set rules by consensus for deep sea mining in international waters. Under ISA jurisdiction, TMC has worked with Tonga and Nauru to explore their allocated areas in a vast swath of the Pacific, but now says the ISA has failed by not agreeing rules after several decades of effort.
The Metals Company CEO Gerard Barron (right) congratulates Leticia Carvalho on her election as International Seabed Authority secretary-general in Kingston, Jamaica, Aug. 2, 2024.(Stephen Wright/RFA)
Critics of the nascent industry say the copper, cobalt, manganese and nickel found in the potato-sized nodules that carpet parts of the seafloor is already abundant on land. They warn that hoovering the nodules up from depths of several kilometers will cause irreparable damage to an ocean environment still poorly understood by science.
Amid a general retreat by large corporations from commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, deep sea mining companies have recently emphasized defense uses and security of mineral supply. Previously the nodules were touted as a source of metals needed for green technologies, such as electric vehicles, that would reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
According to Currie’s congressional testimony, the arguments for deep sea mining rest on fallacies. China’s dominance in the cobalt and nickel markets is due to it processing those minerals imported from Congo and Indonesia and deep sea mining would not significantly change that equation. Also a growing proportion of batteries in electric vehicles no longer rely on cobalt and nickel
“TMC promised the people of Nauru jobs and prosperity,” said Shiva Gounden, head of Greenpeace’s Pacific chapter. “But it has taken the first chance it got to turn its back on Nauru and it will do the same to any other Pacific country,” Gounden said in a statement.
Gerard Barron, TMC‘s chief executive, said the company’s partnerships with Tonga and Nauru remain “rock solid.”
“They too have been let down by the lack of performance at the ISA,” he told Radio Free Asia.
The case made by Barron and the Trump administration is that deep sea mining is a legitimate freedom in waters beyond national jurisdiction – an idea that has become antiquated as international law evolved over decades.
The U.S. has not ratified the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which governs international waters and also established the seabed authority, but in practice recognizes and attempts to enforce its principles.
The U.S. in 1970 also formally recognized that a law of the sea treaty accepted by most countries would establish the rules even for states not a party to it.
“For the last thirty years, the United States has engaged in acts that uphold the object and purpose” of the law of the sea treaty, said Coalter G. Lathrop, director of international law firm Sovereign Geographic, in a blog post this month for the European Journal of International Law.
Even so, the Trump executive order appears to be a new lease on life for The Metals Company.
At the end of March, it had only US$2.3 million cash in the bank and short-term debt of US$10 million. This week it announced a sale of shares in the company that will raise about US$37 million, according to a regulatory filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission. TMC said the money would keep it afloat until it gets a U.S. license for commercial mining.
Its U.S. application has been criticized by France, China and other countries. A coalition of Pacific island civil society organizations called for TMC to be blacklisted by the seabed authority and for Nauru and Tonga to end their agreements with the company.
Deep sea mining is depicted in a mural at the International Seabed Authority office in Kingston, Jamaica, July 30, 2024.(Stephen Wright/RFA)
Currie said the U.N. treaty presents numerous obstacles to TMC realizing its ambitions.
“This casts doubt on whether any metals brought up by TMC under a unilateral permit could be sold,” he told Radio Free Asia.
TMC is a Canadian company while Allseas, the company that owns the ship and mining equipment used by TMC, is Swiss. Both countries, Currie told RFA, have obligations under the U.N. treaty to ensure their nationals don’t participate in breaches of it.
TMC also has an agreement for metals processing with a company based in another treaty signatory nation – Japan.
TMC‘s prospectus for its share sale acknowledges the possibility of legal consequences if it gets a U.S.-issued mining permit.
The ISA and many nations that are signatories to the law of the sea treaty “are likely to regard such a permit as a violation of international law,” it said.
This could “affect international perceptions of the project and could have implications for logistics, processing and market access” including legal challenges in the court systems of treaty member nations.
Attempting a unilateral route to mine the international seabed risks severe geopolitical repercussions “and it could be U.S. interests that get burnt,” said Greenpeace deep sea mining campaigner Louisa Casson.
“Going against the Law of the Sea could trigger impacts far beyond deep sea mining – for maritime boundaries, freedom of navigation and other security interests,” she told RFA.
Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Stephen Wright for RFA.
Deportees face inhumane treatment and torture, say lawyers contesting Labour’s migration policy
The UK government’s migration plans are facing an imminent challenge this week, with lawyers seeking to overturn deportations to Bulgaria due to allegations of brutal conditions faced by migrants and asylum seekers in the country.
Move to speed up appeals of people in government-funded hotels could be challenged on discrimination grounds, officials warn
A plan to fast-track the appeals of asylum seekers living in government-funded hotels could face multiple legal challenges on the grounds of discrimination, the government has said.
A 24-week legal deadline on appeal decisions for those staying in hotel rooms is being introduced in an attempt to fulfil a Labour manifesto promise to end a practice that costs the taxpayer billions of pounds a year.
Exclusive: Transgender activists worry that EHRC is taking an overly literal approach to supreme court ruling
A cross-party committee of MPs has written to the UK’s equalities watchdog to seek assurances that its guidance on how organisations interpret the landmark supreme court ruling on gender issues does not ignore the needs of transgender people.
The letter from the Commons women and equalities committee to Kishwer Falkner, the chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, also urged her to extend the two-week timetable for people to submit views on how the EHRC’s code of practice for organisations should work, saying this should be at least six weeks.
Doug Paulley and Kevin Jordan say their lives being ruined, and lack of effective strategy infringes their human rights
Two men who say they are being failed by the UK’s flawed response to climate breakdown are taking their case to Europe’s top human rights court.
Doug Paulley and Kevin Jordan say their lives have been ruined by the rising temperatures and extreme weather caused by the climate crisis, and that the government’s response fails to respect their human rights.
It would be wrong for Labour to collude in the attack on the European convention. It’s fuelled by myths and false narratives
Here’s a recent quote from a Downing Street source: “We have to be able to say something on this that isn’t just defending the status quo.”
The aide was discussing the European convention on human rights (ECHR), a postwar treaty to protect the freedoms of people in Europe, ratified by the UK in 1951. Although it was also central to Keir Starmer’s entire pre-political career, his government is looking to water down some of the key provisions.
Jamie Burton is a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers. Finnian Clarke, also a barrister at Doughty Street, co-authored
More than 130 women and children who fled Haiti to seek healthcare rounded up in hospitals and sent back
Pregnant women and new mothers are being rounded up in hospitals in the Dominican Republic and deported back to Haiti as part of what observers say is an openly cruel, racist and misogynist government policy.
World now in era of repressive regimes’ impunity, climate inaction and unchecked corporate power, says report
The first 100 days of Donald Trump’s presidency have “supercharged” a global rollback of human rights, pushing the world towards an authoritarian era defined by impunity and unchecked corporate power, Amnesty International warns today.
In its annual report on the state of human rights in 150 countries, the organisation said the immediate ramifications of Trump’s second term had been the undermining of decades of progress and the emboldening of authoritarian leaders.
The Committee to Protect Journalists joined six other international and local press freedom organizations in a joint report warning the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of systematic freedom of expression and press freedom violations in Honduras ahead of the country’s human rights record review.
The report, sent to the UPR on April 7, alerts of laws restricting freedom of expression and press freedom in Honduras; murders and attacks against journalists and indigenous media; threats to academic freedom and the limitation of equal participation of women journalists and authors in the media and publishing houses as well as violence against women journalists and historically marginalized communities.
Among 13 recommendations include the revision of the Protection Law and its regulations to strengthen the institutional protection mechanism; the repeal of crimes against honor to prevent further violations of the media and journalists; and the application of the necessary measures to ensure that an inclusive gender and diversity perspective is fully integrated into public and private cultural, journalistic and editorial programs.
Read the joint statement in English here and in Spanish here.
São Paulo, April 28, 2025—The Committee to Protect Journalists joined Peru’s independent media in a joint statement condemning a law enacted by President Dina Boluarte on April 14 that could negatively impact nonprofit media organizations and journalism operations funded by international cooperation.
The law requires such outlets to register their journalistic plans, projects and programs in a state-run registry, a violation of the right to professional secrecy, and puts disproportionate sanctions on activities described in vague terms.
More than 270 organizations and journalists have signed the statement, which rebukes the law as a mechanism of censorship and “the result of a political coalition that has seized control of nearly all branches of the state.”
I have drafted a Preamble I believe our Founding Fathers should have adopted as the opening statement of the Australian Constitution in 1901. We should vote on it (or a better version) at a Referendum to be held on the same day as Federal Election 2028 so that future Parliaments are required to uphold the …
Hearings over bar on cooperation with Palestinian aid agency are test of Israel’s defiance of international law
Israel will come under sustained legal pressure this week at the UN’s top court when lawyers from more than 40 states will claim the country’s ban on all cooperation with the UN’s Palestinian rights agency Unrwa is a breach of the UN charter.
The five days of hearings at the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague have been given a fresh urgency by Israel’s decision on 2 March to block all aid into Gaza, but the hearing will focus on whether Israel – as a signatory to the UN charter – acted unlawfully in overriding the immunities afforded to a UN body. Israel ended all contact and cooperation with Unrwa operations in Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem in November, claiming the agency had been infiltrated by Hamas, an allegation that has been contested.
The UN has called the detention of Pablo López Alavez ‘arbitrary’, while human rights organisations say his sentence is part of a systematic and alarming pattern of criminalisation of Mexico’s environmental activists
The meeting room in the prison of Villa de Etla, a town in Oaxaca, Mexico, doubles as a classroom with school desks and a small library. The walls feature motivational phrases such as “First things first”, “Live and let live” and “Little by little, you’ll go far”.
Pablo López Alavez, a 56-year-old environmental defender, has had nearly 15 years to contemplate these sentiments – and faces 15 more, after being imprisoned for murders he says he did not commit.
We are Harvard Law students who have read the lengthy and comprehensive list of demands on our Harvard University by your staff. They are assuredly designed to turn this institution of higher education, older than the U.S.A., into a fiefdom under your iron rule. As modest students of medieval history, we see that your demands provide a status for the peasants – the students, the vassals – the faculty, but no one for the role of the Lord of the Manor.
It is obvious that you want to become the LORD OF THE MANOR. We have a proposal. There is no more exalted status at Harvard than that of the law professors. They are the best and brightest law professors in the land; if you doubt that, just ask them. They are specialists in knowledge of the law. However, they are not specialists in the seriously destabilizing arena of lawlessness.
Quite candidly, we believe and can document that you are the world’s expert on lawlessness – its range, depth, rewards and modes of escape from accountability. For some unfathomable reason, you have been far too modest about your unparalleled knowledge in this fast-expanding area of immune business and political activity. We make this claim after reading your statements – about twenty of them – where you explicitly declare your superior knowledge over all in such subjects as “trade,” “technology,” “drones,” “construction,” “devaluation,” “banks,” – “renewables,” “polls” and even “the power of Facebook.” (See the book, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and Ralph Nader, 2020).
Missing from your expansive proclamations of expertise is the subject of LAWLESSNESS. Having engaged in over 3000 lawsuits and having been sued under tort law and indicted under criminal law, you have demonstrated an escapist skill that even seasoned attorneys find breathtaking. No sheriff has ever caught you. Only one prosecutor has ever convicted you. E. Jean Carroll won two civil tort cases with damages that are still on appeal.
One of your remarkable tactics is interminable stalling of the legal process. Another is how you can personally and continually attack in public, with tough language, the judges and other judicial personnel with complete impunity. As we know from our studies, such vituperative language in the United Kingdom would have landed you in contempt of court and a jail term.
Now, therefore, here is our proposal to fill the position of LORD OF THE MANOR, without impinging on your Day Job as president of the United States. With your permission, we will approach our Dean and request that he appoint you as a VISITING FULL PROFESSOR OF LAW CONDUCTING THE FIRST AND ONLY COURSE IN LAWLESSNESS – its nature, function and strategies of escape from the long arm of the rule of law. It would be the largest class in Harvard Law School history, overflowing our largest auditorium, AUSTIN HALL.
YOU would provide, effortlessly from your extraordinary memory, empirical information never before revealed and analyzed.
Your self-awareness is exceptional, having said in 2019 – “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President,” and having openly wished that you could be King. To understand the rule of law better, it is necessary to understand the outlaws. This is especially true for you, Mr. President because you once declared, “I know more about courts than any human being on earth.”
Going deeper, you are eminently qualified to lecture us on regions of lawlessness abroad and how you think one should try to establish peaceful and law-abiding governance. The Middle East comes to mind. By enlisting the law school’s reservoir of scholarship on these conflicts you could establish yourself as a Nobel-Prize worthy implementor of a profound peaceful PRO-SEMITISM between Arab and Jewish Semites. Just envision your going to Norway to receive the coveted Award that your detractors could never believe was remotely possible.
We anticipate your affirmative response and understand fully if a condition of your acceptance is that the course be taught by Zoom from the Oval Office. Should you wish to have your lectures streamed to a wider audience, the Law School has all the requisite facilities.
Just your exalted title “Honorable visiting Professor of Law, Donald J. Trump” along with your presiding over the White House will anoint you as the LORD OF THE MANOR. You would be addressed by all members of the Harvard University community as “MY LIEGE.”
My friend Henry Brown, who has died aged 85, was a South African and later British solicitor whose human rights work across nearly four decades reads like a South African anti-apartheid struggle “Who’s Who”. In the UK he also became a leader in the field of mediation.
As a young attorney with Cape Town’s leading civil rights firm, Frank, Bernadt and Joffe, he was involved in the trial of leaders of a dramatic march of 30,000 protesters from Langa township into the centre of the city in 1960. Henry, barely into his 20s, was on his way. In 1967 he consulted with the imprisoned Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, on one occasion when the then ANC leader and future president was charged with slacking in the notorious salt mine. The charge was withdrawn after it was reported in the local newspaper.
The Trump administration maintains that it can send people to overseas concentration camps with impunity because “activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy” (BBC, 4/11/25).
As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis.
In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25).
The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”
In an X post (4/15/25) filled with unproven assertions that skirt the question of due process and extraordinary rendition, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “The entire American media and left-wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” (Are we supposed to believe that the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, are a part of the “left-wing industrial complex?”)
The complete disregard to constitutional protections of due process and to court orders should send alarm bells throughout American society. The MAGA movement condones sending unconvicted migrants to a foreign hellhole largely on grounds that they are not US citizens, and thus don’t have a right to constitutional due process. But the administration has floated the idea of doing the same thing to “homegrown” undesirables as well (Al Jazeera, 4/15/25).
‘An uncertain end’
The New York Times (4/15/25) goes out on a limb and declares that the president defying the Supreme Court is “a path with an uncertain end.”
The case is quite obviously not about the extremity or unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s policies, but a breaking point at which the executive branch has left the democratic confines of the Constitution, as many journalists and scholars have warned about. But the case is not necessarily being portrayed that way in the establishment press.
In an article about the Trump administration’s record of resisting court orders, a New York Times subhead (4/15/25) read, “Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.” In an article about “What to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador” (4/14/25), reporter Alan Feuer described the Supreme Court’s upholding the order to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García as “complicated and rather ambiguous” rather than a “clear victory for the administration.”
At the Washington Post (4/14/25), law professor Stuart Banner wrote an opinion piece saying that fears of a constitutional crisis were overblown, noting that while Trump is “famous for his contemptuous remarks about judges…tension between the president and the Supreme Court is centuries old.” Thus, he said, there are incentives in both branches to “not to let conflict ripen into public defiance.”
The Wall Street Journal (4/15/25) presents the prospect of the White House defying a Supreme Court order as a “showdown” that Trump might “win.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/15/25) said:
Mr. Trump would be wise to settle all of this by quietly asking Mr. Bukele to return Mr. Ábrego García, who has a family in the US. But the president may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss. If this case does become a judicial showdown, Mr. Trump may assert his Article II powers not to return Mr. Ábrego García, and the Supreme Court will be reluctant to disagree.
But Mr. Trump would be smarter to play the long game. He has many, much bigger issues than the fate of one man that will come before the Supreme Court. By taunting the judiciary in this manner, he is inviting a rebuke on cases that carry far greater stakes.
These articles display a naivete about the current moment. The Trump administration and its allies have flatly declared that they believe a judicial check on the executive authority wrongly places constitutional restraints on Trump’s desires (New York Times, 3/19/25; Guardian, 3/22/25).
House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to court rulings that went against MAGA desires, “warned that Congress’ authority over the federal judiciary includes the power to eliminate entire district courts,” Reuters (3/25/25) reported. The House also approved legislation, along party lines, that “limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration” (AP, 4/9/25).
In other words, Trump’s defiance of the courts is part of a broader campaign to assert that the Constitution simply should not be an impediment to his rule. That’s not a liberal versus conservative debate about national policy, but a declaration that the United States will no longer operate as a constitutional republic.
‘Constitutional crisis is here’
“Think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts,” urges Rex Huppke (USA Today, 4/15/25). “It’s time to stand up and shout ‘Hell no!’ right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.”
Pieces like the ones at the Journal, Times and Post give readers the sense that this affair is just another quirk of the American system of checks and balances, when, in fact, history could look back and declare this the moment when the Constitution became a dead letter.
Other outlets, however, appeared to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “America Is Dangerously Close to Being Run by a King Who Answers to No One” was the headline of Rex Huppke column at USA Today (4/15/25). “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here” was the headline of a recent piece by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (4/14/25).
This case will roil on, and both the judicial system (Reuters, 4/15/25) and congressmembers (NBC News, 4/16/25) are taking action. There’s still time for the papers to treat this case with the urgency that it deserves.
CPJ joined 31 other organizations in an April 16 statement calling on the European Commission to strengthen its annual rule of law report, which assesses media freedom in European Union member states.
The statement said the European Commission “should issue targeted recommendations to mitigate risks to media freedom and pluralism, ensuring a comprehensive and transparent approach to protecting journalism and journalists across the EU.”
A Liberal Democrat MP refused entry to Hong Kong to see her young grandson has said her experience should be “a wake-up call for any parliamentarian”, given that it seems to show China holds a secret list of banned politicians.
Wera Hobhouse, who was turned back by officials on Thursday, said she was given no explanation as to why this happened, and could only assume that it was because she had spoken out about rights abuses by China.
Lured by promises of an education but allegedly trapped in servitude and self-mortification, the former members are suing the ultra-conservative organisation over their ‘exploitation and abuse’
The first item Opus Dei gave 12-year-old Andrea Martínez was a pink dress. The second was a schedule that detailed every task for every minute of her day. Then, when she was 16, she was given a cilice – a spiked metal chain to wear around her thigh – and a whip.
In the late 1980s, Opus Dei, a secretive and ultra-conservative Catholic organisation, promised Martínez an escape from a life of poverty in rural Argentina. By attending one of their schools, they said, she would receive an education and opportunities.
Exclusive: Action comes five years after lack of legal recognition for humanist marriage in England and Wales was ruled discriminatory
Two couples are taking the government to court over its failure to legalise humanist marriage in England and Wales five years after a ruling that the lack of recognition was discriminatory.
Engaged couples Terri O’Sullivan and Edd Berrill, from Coventry, and Nicole Shasha and Rory Booth, from Leicester, are preparing to go to court in their fight to be married in line with their humanist beliefs.
