The Latest Breaking News from Human Rights

In England and Wales, whole-life imprisonment is the harshest sanction available to the courts, emerging in the decades after the abolition of the death penalty. The whole-life order requires people to spend their whole lives in prison with no prospect of release, except on exceptional compassionate grounds.

Human rights group Amnesty International has accused Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups for the first time of crimes against humanity during and after the 7 October, 2023 attack on Israel that led to the war in Gaza.

Guardian story helped to draw attention to planned hanging of Goli Kouhkan over death of abusive husband

Dozens of Russian nationals deported from the United States received military summonses immediately after landing in Moscow, according to human rights activists. Others faced separation from loved ones and FSB threats, family members of deportees told Euronews.

European ministers have agreed to negotiate a new approach to the continent's main ECHR human rights treaty, that would make it easier to deport illegal migrants. The decision comes as more governments argue that the treaty restricts their ability to control their borders.

In today’s newsletter: As the UK joins a group of European governments pushing for stricter asylum rules, critics warn of the risks of weakening safeguards

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has appeared in public for the first time in 11 months

Human rights official says politicians are playing into the hands of the populist right as they seek to tackle migration

The ACLU and other groups interviewed more than 45 migrants held at the detention center and call it a “human and civil rights catastrophe.”

Previously sceptical MPs now want to modernise human rights law to prevent an overreach of the law and losing to the far right

Editorial: Calls to modernise human rights law too often assume that hostile public opinion cannot be changed by argument from first principles