By Poppy Cohen On the 8th March 2021, the Leeds Human Rights Journal ran an event with POLIS Society called ‘Women in Focus’ in honour of International Women’s Day. We were incredibly lucky to be joined by three speakers from the University, Dr Lata Narayanaswamy, Dr Laura Loyola-Hernández and...
By Jack Valentine In the early hours of Friday 26th February, President Joe Biden carried out his first military action as President of the United States in the form of airstrikes in Syria. Aimed at facilities used by Iranian backed militia groups. Biden’s decision has brought to light many...
By Samuel Blencoe On Sunday 14th of February or Valentine’s Day, voters in Catalonia went to the polls to elect a new regional parliament and through that, a new regional government. These elections were particularly significant because, for the first time, an amalgamation of pro-independence parties achieved more than 50%...
By Valentina Casulli Inaction surrounding the climate crisis may be the biggest human rights violation the world has ever seen. In the 1970s, fossil fuel companies such as Exxon began conducting intense research into climate science. They found that the level of CO2 was increasing in the atmosphere as a...
By Sotiris Paphitis The island of Cyprus has been torn in two since the illegal military invasion of 1974. The invasion resulted in thousands of deaths, missing persons, and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced. One of the peculiarities of the invasion was the town of Varosha, a district of the...
By Samuel Blencoe For 39 years, from 1939 to 1978, Spaniards lived under a brutal authoritarian regime led by the fascist dictator Francisco Franco. This dictatorship was the result of a three-year-long bloody civil war from which, the Nationalist side emerged victorious. The ensuing Francoist repression saw great suffering and...
By Lawrence Wilde Easily one of the most controversial pieces of legislation is to be introduced this year, the Overseas Operations Bill, (currently in the House of Lords) threatens to create inconsistencies in civil, criminal and human rights law. At the heart of the bill is a presumption against the...
By Zahra Iqbal On the 12th November, the Human Rights Journal held an event with Uyghur Rights Activist Aydin Anwar, the event aimed to educate people on the ongoing crisis in East Turkestan in the Uyghur region, exploring the criminalisation of the Muslim identity in China and then highlighted what...
By Aksa Arshad On October 16 a teacher in France was beheaded by an 18-year-old Muslim refugee. Following this, there has been a rise in Islamophobic hate crimes against France’s Muslims and with further attacks occurring in the French cities of Nice and Avignon. The initial attack was in response...
By Azhar Vickland The ‘Decolonising Human Rights’ panel event was held on 22nd October 2020, by the Leeds Human Rights Journal and the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies (CERS) for Black History Month. The speakers on the panel were all from the School of Sociology and Social Policy and...