law

This week, Mark Zuckerberg’s company has agreed to introduce measures to protect teenagers on Instagram and Facebook and to pay up to 18,000 million dollars to settle a lawsuit brought by dozens of US states. The response is far from unanimous among child welfare organisations, who believe that the measures are unlikely to protect young people, given that they can be overridden by parents, will only be monitored for five years and are, to a large extent, conditional on behaviour. With these measures, responsibility is shifted onto families: if children and teenagers remain hooked, it will be their fault.

Today at 3:00 PM CEST, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the principal judicial body of the United Nations, will issue its advisory opinion on the obligations of states in relation to climate change and the legal consequences of those obligations. The case stems from a Pacific youth initiative, taken up by the small island nation of Vanuatu, which led a coalition of 132 countries to request an opinion. It is expected to determine whether large, polluting countries should be held accountable for damages caused to small island nations.

The brain can become habituated to the deterioration of democracy, warn a neuroscientist and a law expert in an editorial published in Science Advances. "When democratic norms are violated repeatedly, people begin to adapt,’ they explain, calling for a "dishabituation" to democratic decline. This requires "see[ing] things not in light of the deterioration of recent years, but in light of our best historical practices, our largest ideals, and our highest aspirations.

World Cancer Day is celebrated on 4 February. Behind the cases of this disease there are people who, although they have overcome it, bear the burden of the diagnosis years after the end of their treatment. Survivors demand the right to be forgotten so as not to suffer financial, employment and social discrimination.

The impact of animal abandonment goes beyond the pets who suffer it, it is a public health, safety and funding issue as well. Although there have been some improvements in recent years, the experts consulted agree that the system continues to fail. In this guide, we analyze what has changed, who does this issue affect, and what must be improved.

There are no criminal offences to punish synthetic pornography, plus we lack sufficient means to carry out forensic examinations of victims' and perpetrators' phones and staff to process these cases quickly. The law could limit these AI tools to professional and virtuous environments, only by known developers, and for products whose purposes don't violate public order or privacy, and aren't criminal; such measures would be more than enough.