DUBLIN, Ireland – Same-sex marriage was signed into law in Ireland on Thursday, five months after a historic referendum saw the traditionally Catholic nation become the world's first country to vote for gay unions.
Costa Rican indigenous leaders hope the long-delayed Indigenous Autonomy Bill might finally get a hearing in the Legislative Assembly as result of April’s Inter-American Commission on Human Rights ruling ordering the government to take precautionary measures to protect indigenous groups in the Salitre Indigenous Reserve in southwestern Costa Rica.
In the latest curve of Costa Rica’s roller coaster process to legalize in vitro fertilization, the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court has thrown out several challenges to President Luis Guillermo Solís’ decree regulating the fertility procedure here. But before supporters can celebrate the news the president's decree still must overcome another challenge filed this week.
An indigenous rights issue has put Costa Rica’s much-vaunted human rights record to the test as the country struggles to protect members of the Bribrí and Teribe indigenous communities from non-indigenous people who have forcibly, and at times violently, removed them from indigenous ancestral lands.
MEXICO CITY – Parents of 43 students who disappeared last year began a 43-hour hunger strike on Wednesday, a day before meeting with President Enrique Peña Nieto ahead of the case's one-year anniversary.
Protesters demanding justice for 43 missing students and their families clashed with police and torched a truck in Mexico's southern state of Guerrero on Tuesday, just days before the tragedy's first anniversary.
GUATEMALA CITY – An indigenous leader opposed to the production of palm oil was killed Friday outside a Guatemalan court that a day earlier ordered the closure of a factory against which he had led protests.
Germany said it was reinstating border controls on Sunday as Europe's top economy admitted it was stretched to the limit trying to cope with a record influx of refugees. Also on Sunday, Germany's rail service halted train services with Austria for 12 hours. The announcements came as tragedy struck again off the coast of Greece, with 34 more migrants -- among them babies and children -- drowning when their overcrowded wooden boat capsized in high winds.
HAVANA — The Cuban government said it plans to pardon 3,522 prisoners over the next 72 hours as a "humanitarian" gesture ahead of Pope Francis' visit to the island beginning next week. But the announcement appeared to rule out pardons for at least some of the dozens of inmates that rights groups consider political prisoners.
