Courts

This archive collects milestones involving courts — judicial bodies at local, national, and international levels — as actors in meaningful change. Stories here cover rulings, legal precedents, and decisions that advanced rights, accountability, or justice around the world.

Plastic nurdles washed up on a tropical beach for an article about the X-Press Pearl disaster compensation ruling

Sri Lanka wins billion from shipping companies over X-Press Pearl disaster

By / / Good News For Humankind

Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court secured a landmark billion environmental ruling against the owners of the MV X-Press Pearl, the container ship that burned and sank off Colombo in 2021, releasing toxic chemicals and nearly 1,700 tonnes of plastic nurdles across South Asian waters. The July 2025 judgment delivers long-awaited accountability for thousands of fishing families whose livelihoods were devastated overnight. Beyond Sri Lanka, the ruling demonstrates that courts in developing nations can enforce the polluter-pays principle against powerful global shipping interests. Environmental groups are calling it a potential model for the Global South.

Rainbow flag flying above a European city square for an article about same-sex family recognition in Lithuania

Lithuanian court recognizes same-sex couple as a family for the first time

By / / Good News For Humankind

Same-sex family recognition in Lithuania reached a historic milestone in May 2025, when the Vilnius City District Court became the first court in the country to grant legal family status to a same-sex couple and order the state to register their relationship. The ruling was won through years of litigation by LGBTQ+ rights organization TJA, building on a April 2025 Constitutional Court decision that found excluding same-sex couples from civil partnership recognition violated constitutional rights. With parliament still stalled on legislation, this case proves courts can close the gap between constitutional principle and lived reality.

Rainbow flags flying against a blue sky, for an article about Saint Lucia decriminalization of same-sex conduct

Saint Lucia’s High Court decriminalizes same-sex conduct, ending colonial-era law

By / / Good News For Humankind

Saint Lucia decriminalization marks a landmark victory for human rights in the Eastern Caribbean, as the island’s High Court struck down colonial-era laws that imposed up to 10 years in prison for consensual same-sex conduct. The court ruled the statutes violated Saint Lucia’s own constitutional protections for privacy, equality, and human dignity. Significantly, these laws were never locally crafted — they were British colonial impositions from the 19th century. The ruling joins a growing wave of similar decisions across the region, reflecting a clear shift toward constitutional equality in Caribbean jurisprudence.

The Peace Palace in The Hague, seat of the ICJ, for an article about the World Court climate legal obligation ruling

World Court rules nations have a legal duty to protect the climate

By / / Good News For Humankind

The International Court of Justice issued a landmark climate ruling in July 2025, declaring that all countries have binding legal obligations under international law to cut greenhouse gas emissions and prevent climate harm. The World Court formally linked climate damage to violations of the rights to life and health, marking the first time an international judicial body has made that connection explicit. Countries that breach these obligations may face requirements to halt polluting activities, prevent future harm, and pay reparations to affected states. The ruling emerged from a student-led campaign in Vanuatu and carries enormous legal and political weight, even without a direct enforcement mechanism.

A river winding through the Colombian Amazon rainforest for an article about Indigenous mercury ruling — 13 words

Colombia’s top court orders mercury cleanup for 30 poisoned Indigenous communities

By / / Good news links

Colombia’s Constitutional Court has delivered a landmark Indigenous mercury ruling, ordering the government to protect 30 Amazon communities whose food and water have been poisoned by illegal gold mining. Mercury levels in the Yuruparí macroterritory reached up to 17 times above safe limits, with 93% of tested individuals showing dangerous concentrations. The court assigned specific duties to multiple government ministries and suspended new gold mining licenses while protections are developed. Crucially, the ruling frames environmental harm as inseparable from cultural survival, building on Colombia’s 2016 precedent granting legal personhood to the Atrato River and offering a replicable model for Indigenous-led environmental justice worldwide.

Two women holding a young child outdoors for an article about same-sex parental rights

Italy’s top court rules both same-sex mothers must appear on birth certificates

By / / Good News For Humankind

Same-sex parental rights in Italy took a landmark step forward on May 22, 2025, when the Constitutional Court ruled that both women in a same-sex couple must be legally recognized as parents of children conceived abroad through assisted reproduction. The decision closes a painful legal gap that left thousands of children without guaranteed ties to their non-biological mother. Centering children’s welfare rather than parental identity, the Court found that excluding co-mothers from birth certificates violates constitutional principles of equality and legal certainty. Italy now joins much of Western Europe in offering this foundational protection, though domestic restrictions on IVF for same-sex couples remain unresolved.

Chevron gas station located near a Louisiana wetlands restoration project site along the coast, for article on Louisiana wetlands restoration

Chevron ordered to pay $740 million to restore Louisiana coast in landmark trial

By / / Good News For Humankind

Louisiana wetlands just got a powerful new defender: a jury ordered Chevron to pay $744.6 million to restore marshland in Plaquemines Parish, with interest pushing the total past $1.1 billion. Jurors found that Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001, had spent decades dredging canals and dumping wastewater into the marsh without meaningful cleanup. The ruling matters far beyond one rural parish — it’s the first of dozens of similar cases to reach trial, and the communities on this vanishing coast are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and low-income. As courts from Europe to the Americas increasingly hold polluters accountable, this verdict signals that coastal destruction is no longer just a political fight. It’s a legal one.

International court rules against El Salvador in key abortion rights case

By / / Good News For Humankind

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights just set a new floor for reproductive rights across Latin America, ruling that El Salvador violated a young woman’s fundamental rights by denying her a life-saving abortion in 2013. Beatriz was 22, gravely ill with lupus and kidney damage, and carrying a fetus that could not survive outside the womb — yet the country’s total ban forced her into an emergency C-section instead of care. The court has now ordered El Salvador to allow abortions when a woman’s life or health is at risk. Six other Latin American countries still ban abortion outright, and advocates say Beatriz’s name now anchors a precedent they’ll carry into courts and legislatures across the hemisphere.

image for article on Gisèle Pelicot trial

Dominique Pelicot sentenced to 20 years in prison in historic French rape trial

By / / Good News For Humankind

The Gisèle Pelicot trial ended with all 51 defendants convicted on at least one charge — a sweep almost unheard of in cases of drug-facilitated sexual violence. Her husband, who spent nearly a decade drugging her and inviting strangers to assault her, received the maximum 20-year sentence. What made the trial extraordinary wasn’t only the verdicts but Gisèle’s choice to waive her anonymity, sit through three months of hearings, and insist that shame belonged to the perpetrators. Outside the courthouse in Avignon, crowds applauded each ruling, and feminist groups hung banners reading “Thanks Gisèle.” Her stand has reignited a push to rewrite France’s rape laws around consent — and offered survivors everywhere a different model of what refusing silence can look like.

Chase Strangio to be the first openly trans lawyer to present to the Supreme Court

By / / Good News For Humankind

Chase Strangio made history on December 4, 2024, becoming the first openly transgender lawyer to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, challenges Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans minors — and Strangio came prepared, having argued the core issues before federal appeals courts four times, more than any attorney in the country. His path here runs through Obergefell, Bostock, and a winning challenge to Arkansas’s youth healthcare ban, alongside grassroots work supporting LGBTQ+ immigrants. Whatever the Court decides, the moment itself matters: trans communities, so often the subject of legal disputes rather than participants in them, finally had one of their own at the lectern — a shift in who gets to shape the law that shapes their lives.