Human Rights

Human Rights


UN panel says racist hate speech by Trump and other US leaders has led to human rights violations

GENEVA (AP) — A U.N.-backed panel of independent experts focusing on racial discrimination says racist hate speech by U.S. President Donald Trump and other American political leaders, along with a crackdown on immigration in the United States, have led to “grave human rights violations.” The Geneva-based Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination issued its […]

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Supreme Court blocks law against schools outing transgender students to their parents in California

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court cleared the way Monday for California schools to tell parents if their children identify as transgender without getting the student’s approval, granting an emergency appeal from a conservative legal group. The order blocks for now a state law that bans automatic parental notification requirements if students change their pronouns […]

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Worms in food, poor medical care, lights on 24/7: Families tell of life in Texas detention center

LAREDO, Texas (AP) — A month after ICE agents sent the young Ecuadorian mother and her 7-year-old daughter to a sprawling detention center 1,300 miles from their Minnesota home, they were finally free. But when the bus pulled up to a migrant shelter in the border city of Laredo, dropping off a half-dozen families lugging […]

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Fighting Cancer, Facing Deportation and Denied Health Care

Francisco Barahona is recovering at home with a shattered arm after Surrey Memorial Hospital, he says, refused to treat him on the weekend because of unpaid past bills.  The 53-year-old’s health has been deteriorating over the past three years as a cancer hollowed out his bones and he couldn’t afford health care. Now the government […]

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Chinese asylum seeker who exposed rights abuses fights to stay in the US

WASHINGTON (AP) — Guan Heng, who exposed human rights abuses in his native China, has been in U.S. custody since being swept up in an immigration enforcement operation in August. He says he dares not even think about what would happen to him if he were sent back. “I would be prosecuted, I would be […]

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Trump administration calls out human rights records of some nations accepting deported migrants

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration on Tuesday released human rights reports for countries worldwide, which eliminate mentions of discrimination faced by LGBTQ people, reduce a previous focus on reproductive rights and criticize restrictions on political speech by U.S. allies in Europe that American officials believe target right-wing politicians. The reports, which cover 2024 before […]

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Provincial code of conduct in schools protects students from gender, sexual orientation disclosure

As other provinces police LGBTTQ+ pronouns in schools, Manitoba is doubling down on its support for students to explore their identities on their own timeline. The Education Department released a new provincial code of conduct for kindergarten-to-Grade 12 schools on June 11. The 38-page document provides guidance on how to navigate student behaviour issues and […]

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Australia whistleblower who exposed war crime allegations loses bid to reduce prison sentence

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — Australian army whistleblower David McBride, who leaked allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan to the media, lost a court bid to have his prison sentence reduced on Wednesday. The three Australian Capital Territory Court of Appeal judges unanimously rejected the 61-year-old former army lawyer’s appeal against the severity of a […]

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B.C. human rights commissioner details government action, inaction on recommendations

British Columbia’s human rights commissioner says her office has been “re-energized” to push the provincial government to act upon dozens of recommendations to improve human rights made in her first five-year term.  Kasari Govender’s office released a report Tuesday into the progress made by the government to act upon recommendations made between 2019 and 2024.  […]

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‘Israeli use of human shields in Gaza was systematic, soldiers and former detainees tell the AP

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — The only time the Palestinian man wasn’t bound or blindfolded, he said, was when he was used by Israeli soldiers as their human shield. Dressed in army fatigues with a camera fixed to his forehead, Ayman Abu Hamadan was forced into houses in the Gaza Strip to make sure they […]

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North Korean defectors urge the UN to hold the country’s leader accountable for rights abuses

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — Eunju Kim, who escaped starvation in North Korea in 1999, was sent back from China and fled a second time, told the United Nations on Tuesday that the country’s leader must be held accountable for gross human rights violations. Gyuri Kang, whose family faced persecution for her grandmother’s religious beliefs, fled […]

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Risks of state abortion reporting mandates outweigh the benefits, an advocacy group says

States should stop requiring health providers to file reports on every abortion because the information poses a risk to both them and their patients in the current political environment, a research group that advocates for abortion access says. The Guttmacher Institute says in a new recommendation that the benefit of mandated and detailed data collection […]

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