On January 12, 2026, days before Uganda’s national elections on January 15, the National Bureau for Non-Governmental Organizations ordered at least 10 nongovernmental organizations to immediately cease their operations indefinitely. The suspended organizations include human rights, media, and election monitoring organizations.
Colonel Claude Pivi, Guinea’s former minister for presidential security and one of the men convicted in a landmark trial for rapes and killings committed in Guinea in 2009, reportedly died in custody in a hospital on January 6, 2026, of natural causes.
• The Hungarian government is failing to ensure older people’s rights to social security and an adequate standard of living, including access to sufficient food, medicine, and energy.
• The rise in poverty among older people, which became evident during sharp inflation in 2022 and 2023, highlights longstanding structural problems with the Hungarian pension and social security system.
• Hungary should raise the lowest pensions to reduce pension inequality and guarantee the rights of all older people in the country to social security and an adequate standard of living.
New reporting that US forces used an aircraft painted to appear civilian for a lethal strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea on September 2, 2025,—killing 11 people—raises new questions about the erosion of internal safeguards on US military operations.
UK lawmakers are set to vote on January 14 on a proposed amendment to the Public Order Act 2023. If adopted, the change, which is drafted in vague and broad language, would expose people who organize or participate in protests near a wide range of sites to criminal penalties
Around the world, economic inequality is fueling both the rise of authoritarianism and protesters going to the streets to demand change. Tax policy is inextricably bound up with those issues.
In March 2017, grainy video footage revealed that armed men walked Zaida Catalán, a 36-year-old Swede, and Michael Sharp, a 34-year-old American, through a savanna, sat them down and shot them. The brutal murders of the two United Nations investigators—and the disappearance of their Congolese interpreter and the three motorbike drivers who accompanied them—sent shockwaves across the Democratic Republic of Congo and the broader international community, especially among researchers and human rights defenders working in central Africa.
Saudi authorities executed at least 356 people in 2025, setting a new record in the country for the highest number of executions in one-year since monitoring began.
Iranian authorities have intensified their lethal crackdown on protesters since January 8, with credible reports that security forces are carrying out large-scale killings across the country.