“Daphne’s brutal assassination continues to cast a dark shadow over Maltese public life,” said Pieter Omtzigt (Netherlands, EPP/CD), PACE rapporteur on the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia and the rule of law in Malta, in a statement to mark 12 July 2020, the 1,000th day since her death. “The tireless devotion of her family, the …
Legal
COPENHAGEN, 9 July 2020 – Responding to reports that executions are set to resume on the federal level in the United States for the first time since 2003, the leaders of the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly’s human rights committee renewed calls for universal abolition of the death penalty. Kyriakos Hadjiyianni (Cyprus), Michael Link (Germany), and Kari …
The Council of Europe has proven to be an essential, indispensable guardian of human rights during the Covid-19 pandemic. This is one of the main conclusions of a new report by the Secretary General covering the Council of Europe’s actions since the Helsinki Ministerial Meeting in May 2019 and the organisation’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. “Our …
The Council of Europe’s Anti-Torture Committee (CPT) has called upon the 47 member States of the Council of Europe to seize the opportunity of the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic in prisons to put an end to prison overcrowding through the emergency measures which have been put in place temporarily, including the use of alternatives to imprisonment. …
Following the recent convictions of the four Turkish human rights defenders – Taner Kılıç, İdil Eser, Günal Kuşun and Özlem Dalkıran – in the so-called Büyükada trial, the rapporteurs of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) Alexandra Louis (France, ALDE), Thomas Hammarberg (Sweden, SOC) and John Howell (UK, EC/DA) issued a joint …
VIENNA, 8 July 2020 – Despite its high profits and catastrophic harm to victims, trafficking in human beings for the removal of organs is one of the least understood and addressed forms of human trafficking globally and needs urgent attention from the international community, an international group of experts concluded in a two-day online meeting …
The European Court of Human Rights has today decided not to apply an interim measure requested in the case Gyulumyan and Others v. Armenia (application no. 25240/20) concerning recent amendments to the Constitution of Armenia. In 2015 the Constitution of Armenia was amended, introducing a 12-year non-renewable term of office for Constitutional Court (CC) judges …
On July 8, at the extraordinary sitting of the RA NA Standing Committee on State and Legal Affairs moderated by Vladimir Vardanyan the draft law on Making Addenda to the RA Criminal Procedure Code was debated. The RA Deputy Minister of Justice Srbuhi Galyan voiced the recommendations presented after the first reading and gave details …
In a report published today, the working group on judicial time management of the European Commission for the Efficiency of Justice (CEPEJ) takes stock of this internal management system aimed at assessing the “weight” of a judicial case, by detailing, through various methods, the judicial time needed for its processing. The information resulting from the weighting of cases can be …
Vilnius, Lithuania, July 1, 2020 – Russian authorities should ensure that journalists are able to cover the country’s ongoing vote freely, and should refrain from harassing and detaining members of the press, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. Since June 21, authorities have attacked, arrested, or harassed at least five journalists in the lead-up …
