Amnesty International (AI) lauded Myanmar’s government on Friday for its decision to form a committee to review political prisoner cases. The committee will determine whether to grant amnesty to Myanmar’s political prisoners, many of whom were allegedly falsely charged or convicted of a serious offense, arbitrarily detained, or imprisoned solely for their peaceful political activities. [...]
United Nations (UN) Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Saturday condemned a mortar attack on Camp Liberty, an Iranian exile camp near the Iraq capital Baghdad. The attack reportedly killed six people and injured several others. The camp functions as a temporary holding facility for over 3000 exiles, where the Office of the UN High Commissioner [...]
Afzal Guru , a Kashmiri militant who received the death penalty for participating in the 2001 attack on India’s parliament , was executed on Saturday. Guru was hanged after India’s president, Shri Pranab Mukherjee , turned down his plea for clemency. Following Guru’s execution, India’s government imposed a curfew in the India-controlled section of Kashmir [...]
Egypt’s administrative court ordered the country’s National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA) on Friday to block YouTube because it carried the controversial amateur film Innocence of Muslims . The amateur film sparked violent protests in the Middle East last year for portraying the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud and a womanizer. The court declared that YouTube [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Brittany Giusini, Widener University School of Law Class of 2014, discusses the negative impacts of the recent Russian ban on US-based adoptions…
The US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Friday that a settlement has been reached with Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC, known by the public as Macmillan , over allegations that the publishing company conspired with Apple to raise the retail price of e-books. The DOJ’s Antitrust Division reached agreements previously with Hachette Book Group Inc., HarperCollins Publishers [...]
The Congress of the Philippines on Wednesday passed a bill to protect the rights of more than one million internally displaced persons (IDPs). The bill was praised by the UN Refugee Agency on Friday. If the bill is signed into law, the Philippines will become the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to have legislation [...]
The Arkansas Senate on Thursday approved revisions to the state’s lethal injection law. The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the 2009 version of the law last year, finding that a provision allowing the state department of corrections to choose the drug for lethal injection violates the separation of powers in the Arkansas constitution . Since [...]
Senegal’s newly-created Extraordinary African Chambers officially opened on Friday to prepare for the prosecution of former Chadian dictator Hissene Habre . Senegal’s national assembly adopted a law in December allowing for the creation of the special tribunal with the support of the African Union (AU) and financial assistance from the European Union and the US [...]
Turkey’s parliament on Thursday approved legislation to prohibit terrorism financing. In passing this legislation , Turkey may have narrowly avoided expulsion from the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) . Turkish President Abduallah Gul now has 15 days to approve the legislation, after which it can be enacted. FATF has given Turkey until February 22 to [...]
