Free Republic

The grant raised concerns for the potential of abuse by organizations to act against Israel via BDS and international law tribunals. The US State Department has offered a grant of up to $987,654 for projects that include reporting human rights violations by Israel, raising concern about the potential for abuse by organizations seeking boycotts, sanctions and international law tribunals against Israel. The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) announced "an open competition for projects that strengthen accountability and human rights in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza" last month, thought to be the first of its kind...

The Iranian regime is not only covering up its nuclear weapons ambitions. For more than three decades, the extremist theocracy has tried to cover up one of its greatest crimes against humanity. In 1988, in what became known as the 1988 massacre, Tehran began the systematic killing of thousands of dissidents and opposition activists. Ultimately, an estimated 30,000 people lost their lives in the brutal massacre. But a court in Sweden is now ending the regime's cover-up. In November 2019, Swedish authorities arrested a man, Hamid Noury, believed to have been involved in the 1988 massacre. On July 27, 2021,...

Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline judge who is under U.S. sanctions for human rights abuses, secured victory as expected on Saturday in Iran’s presidential election after a contest marked by voter apathy over economic hardships and political restrictions... Turnout in Friday's four-man race was a record low of around 48.8% and there were 3.7 million invalid ballots that were likely to have been mostly blank or protest votes. Appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the high-profile job of judiciary chief in 2019, Raisi was placed under U.S. sanctions a few months later over human rights violations. Those included the...

Agnes Callamard, the U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing, said on Thursday night that the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian terrorist mastermind Gen. Qasem Soleimani was a violation of international law. The U.N. has been oddly quiet about Soleimani’s violations of international law, including activities that indisputably violated U.N. sanctions. “The targeted killings of Qasem Soleiman and Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis are most likely unlawful and violate international human rights law: Outside the context of active hostilities, the use of drones or other means for targeted killing is almost never likely to be legal,” Callamard wrote on Twitter. She proceeded...

I was readying a piece about Qasem Soleimani when I got the news: President Trump ordered a game-changing U.S. military attack that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force, among other military officials at Baghdad International Airport early Friday, the Pentagon confirmed.Soleimani is the military mastermind whom Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had deemed equally as dangerous as Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In October, Baghdadi killed himself during a U.S. raid on a compound in northwest Syria, seven months after the so-called ISIS "caliphate" crumbled as the terrorist group lost its final swath of Syrian territory in March. Justice has been served. Iran is outraged: Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif tweeted...

Audio recordings of the horrifying conversations between the 15-man Saudi hit squad and their victim, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has been revealed to the public for the first time by the Turkish daily Sabah. The conversations recorded prior to and during the Oct. 2, 2018 murder of the dissident journalist at the kingdom's Istanbul consulate were obtained by Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) right after the gruesome incident, and were shared with related Turkish authorities carrying out an investigation into the incident, as well as with international officials and institutions. One of the recordings of the conversations between Maher Abdulaziz Mutreb,...

GENEVA (18 June 2018) – UN human rights experts* have made a fresh call to Iran to annul the death sentence imposed on Iranian Kurd Ramin Hossein Panahi, amid reports that he will be executed after the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The execution of Mr. Panahi was previously set for 3 May, but was postponed. It is understood that a request for a judicial review was rejected by the Iranian Supreme Court in late May, and the sentence against him was then referred to the office responsible for carrying it out.“The Iranian authorities must now halt the...

"PRESIDENT Duterte on Sunday lashed out at the U.S. police killings of black men in his latest outburst against critics of his anti-drug campaign, which has left hundreds of suspects dead. The Philippines’ brash-talking President also threatened Sunday to withdraw the country from the United Nations after its human rights experts criticized the extra-judicial killings committed under his anti-crime drive. Reacting to U.S. criticisms, Duterte cited the string of shootings involving police and black men that have sparked protests in the U.S. “Why are you Americans killing the black people there, shooting them down when they are already on the...

The January U.S. drone strike in Iraq that killed top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani and nine other people represented a violation of international law, a U.N. human rights investigator said on Monday. The United States has failed to provide sufficient evidence of an ongoing or imminent attack against its interests to justify the strike on Soleimani's convoy as it left Baghdad airport, said Agnes Callamard, U.N. special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The attack violated the U.N. Charter, Callamard wrote in a report calling for accountability for targeted killings by armed drones and for greater regulation of the...