As the climate crisis rapidly accelerates, legislative bodies around the globe have been under fire for their inaction. A growing multitude of frustrated individuals have turned their attention to the court system in search of new avenues for climate action. In the past three years alone, climate litigation suits doubled from 884 cases in 24 countries to 1,550 cases in 38 countries, revealing an exponential increase in public concerns for the environment as well as a rising dependence on the courts to kickstart government action on climate change. This influx of cases has pushed courts to confront and even rethink their judicial powers and duties in relation to climate action. Large-scale court decisions on climate change have long been unprecedented because issues as vast as climate change typically warrant broad policy changes that are beyond the power of the courts. However, two recent climate suits in Europe have seen remarkable […]

In recent years, many reports have emerged that accuse China of repressing Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority. Earlier in 2021, the U.S. State Department estimated that possibly up to 2 million Uyghurs were being held in detainment centers in the country’s western region of Xinjiang. Former detainees have reported that while in the camps, they were “subjected to intense political indoctrination, forced labor, torture, and even sexual abuse.” Subsequently, in March of 2021, the U.S. put pressure on China through sanctions on various officials over human rights violations, a move that was followed by the European Union, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Now, almost a year later, U.S. legislation has been passed that will, effective immediately, ban imports from the Xinjiang region, citing the many previously mentioned human rights abuses.  The Act serves four main functions: An enforcement strategy that will generate lists of products and materials from Xinjiang […]

The French Republic is built according to three major values: liberté, égalité, fraternité—liberty, equality, fraternity—that inform the commitments of the state codified in the French Constitution. Among these commitments is the French secularist tradition termed laïcité. However, recent legal developments have called into question whether France’s secularist tradition remains effective in promoting liberty, equality, and fraternity in a country that has become increasingly globalized. On Aug. 24, 2021, France’s Constitutional Council passed the law “reinforcing the respect of the principles of the republic,” more popularly known as the law against separatism—referring to the rise of identity groups separate from the French state, commonly associated with “religious, territorial, or racial minorities in France.” This bill, first introduced after various Islamist-drivent attacks in October 2020, grants the state more power over independent organization, including greater fiscal and administrative control over cultural associations. It ultimately extends the state’s enforcement of its Republican values […]

On Sept. 28, 2021, the United States House of Representatives passed H.R.4686, The Cambodia Democracy Act of 2021. This bill requires that the president impose sanctions on Cambodian individuals who commit acts that directly undermine democracy. While the bill has yet to be passed by the Senate, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control were able to impose the sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act, which gives the department the right to sanction individuals and entities accused of human rights violations which would include, as in this case, corruption. Such violations that the legislation describes are in reference to attempts at collusion by members of the Cambodian Ministry of National Defense, Chau Phirun and Tea Vinh. These military officials, who have most recently been stationed at the Chinese-Cambodian Ream Naval Base, allegedly inflated the costs for new construction on facilities at the base and then […]

The COP26 UN Climate Summit that was scheduled from Oct. 31 to Nov. 12 ran into overtime and officially ended on Nov. 13 with approximately 200 countries agreeing to an 11-page Glasgow Climate Pact that has been met with both celebration and criticism from around the world. Some of the most highly-praised commitments to come out of the summit were led by ambitious agreements on deforestation, methane, and carbon markets. More than 100 countries, notably the U.S. Brazil, China, and Russia, agreed to end deforestation by 2030. A similar commitment was made for methane emissions with more than 100 countries vowing to cut methane emissions by 30% in the next 10 years. New rules for the carbon market struck a particularly positive note for climate activists internationally. These rules aim to close loopholes in the carbon market by eliminating double counting of carbon emissions and thus keeping countries more strictly […]