Slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya has been nominated for the European Union's top human rights award. The EU's Human Rights Unit told RFE/RL that Politkovskaya is among the candidates for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has met in Tehran with several human rights activists, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi. The September 3 meeting was held at the UN office in Tehran.

A top European human rights official has met in Baku with rights activists and representatives of NGOs ahead of meetings this week with Azerbaijani officials.

A man convicted of adultery has been stoned to death in Iran. Judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi said the stoning was carried out near the town of Takestan, in the northwestern province of Qazvin.

Torture, ill-treatment and killings continue to be met with persistent impunity for the security forces in Turkey, Amnesty International charged in a new report, Turkey: The Entrenched Culture of Impunity Must End, released on July 4th.

Three documentaries featured at the annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York this year aim to put a human face on the issues and crises facing Africa today. From New York, VOA's Mona Ghuneim has the story.

The European Court of Human Rights has announced on June 27 the launch of two initiatives: web-casting its public hearings and the provision of new information about pending cases on its website.

An Iraqi court has issued a death sentence to the man who has been widely known as "Chemical Ali" for masterminding the mass slaughter of ethnic Kurds in the late 1980s.

Iran was urged by a human rights group to stop executing people under the age of 18, saying that the country leads the world in this practice.

The United States has expressed disappointment that the United Nations Human Rights Council has terminated the mandates of independent experts who studied the rights records of Belarus and Cuba.

Citing Iraq's "procedurally flawed legal processes," the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers today called on the country to halt the application of the death penalty.

The international committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and Russia's lower house of parliament, State Duma, will hold a joint session Thursday to discuss issues of prime concern for Washington and Moscow.