The International Crimes Tribunal Bangladesh (ICTB) on Monday sentenced Salahuddin Quader Chowdhury, a member of parliament for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) , to death for war crimes committed during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War . Chowdhury is the first member of the BNP to stand trial for war crimes under the tribunal set up [...]
US District Judge Myron Thompson approved a settlement Monday that will end segregation of HIV-positive inmates in Alabama prisons. The settlement came as a result of a 2012 decision by Thompson, who found that separating HIV-positive inmates from other inmates was discriminatory and lacked a medical basis. In the settlement, the Alabama Department of Corrections [...]
The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a state law criminalizing speech that “advises” and “encourages” another’s suicide is unconstitutional. In the suit filed against the national right-to-die group Final Exit Network after they were charged with the 2007 suicide of a Minnesota woman, the state argued that speech advising or encouraging suicide is [...]
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced on Monday that it has filed a lawsuit to bar North Carolina from implementing their recently-passed voting reform bill , stating that the stricter requirements will disproportionately effect minority groups. Particularly, the DOJ takes issue with the bill’s reduction of days allotted for early voting, prohibition on the [...]
Civil rights advocacy groups Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU of Virginia on Monday filed a motion for summary judgment requesting that a federal court act quickly to overturn Virginia’s statutory ban on recognizing same-sex marriages. In the lawsuit, filed in August in the US District Court for the Western [...]
Illinois Cook County Circuit Court Judge Sophia Hall on Friday allowed two lawsuits challenging the state’s ban on same-sex marriage to proceed to trial. This could permit Illinois state courts to decide whether same-sex couples will be allowed to marry in Illinois or have marriages obtained in other states recognized within the state of Illinois. [...]
An Indian court on Monday convicted Lalu Prasad Yadav, a former federal minister of India’s state of Bihar and current MP, of corruption, criminal conspiracy and cheating. Yadav and 44 others were found guilty of conspiracy and cheating over a scam in the mid 1990s that siphoned USD $6 million of public money. The conviction [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Paul Juzdan, Seton Hall University School of Law Class of 2014, is the author of a series commenting on the Syrian civil war. Previously, Juzdan explained the nature and complexity of identifying the rebels in Syria and the implications of using the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine in justifying an intervention in [...]
An Egyptian court on Monday upheld a one-year prison sentence against Hisham Kandil , the former prime minister of deposed leader Mohamed Morsi . Kandil was imprisoned in April for failing to follow a court order to re-nationalize a textile company sold by former president Hosni Mubarak . Kandil’s administration argued that re-nationalizing the textile [...]
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Monday that Turkey will end a ban on women wearing traditional Islamic headscarves in public institutions. The lifting of the ban is part of a package of human rights reforms that Erdogan proposed, which also include allowing Kurdish language education and reducing barriers to entry for Kurdish [...]
