Campaigns that seek to aim political ads at citizens in the European Union will have to get permission from those citizens to use their data for targeting, according to a provisional agreement reached by the European Parliament and the Council of Europe.

The European Union has approved the draft Cyber Resilience Act on Wednesday, taking a major step towards boosting cybersecurity for digital products.

The European Union (EU) is taking its final steps toward protecting journalists and activists from abusive lawsuits that are used to intimidate and penalize journalists, media organizations, human rights defenders, activists, researchers, and artists.

Russian opposition leaderAlexei Navalny has been imprisoned for nearly 800 days in one of Russia’s most dreadful prison colonies when a documentary on his poisoning and political activitieswon the Oscar as an outstanding documentary feature.

Russian President Vladimir Putin submitted to the State Duma on Monday adraft law that would see Russia withdraw from the Criminal Law Convention on Corruption (CLCC), a European body dedicated to criminalizing corrupt practices within all of its member states.

Although Kazakh authorities have in the past decade launched numerous initiatives to curb it, corruption remains woven into the fabric of high-levels of society, public bodies, institutions and the private sector, said areport published by the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption body.

Despite progressive revisions to Armenia’s anti-trafficking legislation, the country still has to properly investigate human trafficking cases and offer better support to victims, experts on human trafficking said last week.

An international media watchdog warned on Tuesday about the “disastrous effects of news and information chaos – the effects of a globalized and unregulated online information space that encourages fake news and propaganda.”

Prisons in North Macedonia are filled with corrupt staff, inmates are persistently being  mistreated and authorities have failed to improve longstanding structural deficiencies within the country’s prison system, a Council of Europe report found.

The Council of Europe has called on its member states to prohibit the trade and public availability of tools used for torture and the death penalty.

The Council of Europe is calling for tougher tools for the fight against organized crime which only in the European Union could be making over 100 billion euro a year while authorities are confiscating just a fragment of its proceeds.

The Council of Europe’s anti-graft body said it was concerned about allegations of widespread corruption among public officials in recent years, and that many member countries have mostly failed to properly address lobbying, conflicts of interest and “revolving doors” in central governments.

Serbian investigative outlet KRIK is facing a public smear campaign from the Serbian state which is trying to discredit parts of an investigation KRIK has published in collaboration with OCCRP earlier in  May on the long and violent history of two organized crime groups from Montenegro, the Council of Europe stated on Monday. 

The European Parliament accused the prime minister of the Czech Republic of hate speech on Friday after he called EU lawmakers who led a corruption investigation against him “insane.” 

The European Council updated its list of non-cooperative jurisdictions that do not meet its tax reform requirements on Tuesday, but tax reform advocates say the list is still incomplete.

The Council of Europe gave Malta a “poor overall rating” for its compliance with international anti-money laundering standards, according to anonymous sources who leaked the results to the Times of Malta on Monday.

Switzerland improved its anti-corruption measures over the past few years but still has to work on the political independence of judges, the Council of Europe Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) said on Thursday.

Latvia is falling behind in efforts to prevent corruption in government agencies and courts, according to a report published Monday by the Group of States Against Corruption, a Council of Europe organization.

Citing money-laundering scandals such as the ‘Global Laundromat,’ the ‘Azerbaijani Laundromat’ and the ‘Troika Laundromat’ the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has urged swift and substantial action to strengthen anti-money laundering provisions and improve international cooperation in the fight against such ‘laundromats.’

Corruption and torture are decisively linked, and members of the Council of Europe need to move swiftly and effectively to “eradicate these threats to democracy, human rights and the rule of law,” the organization said last week.