US Senator Dianne Feinstein released a report by the Government Accountability Office on Wednesday which asserts that US prisons could safely absorb the 166 detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay military prison in the event the facility is closed and the detainees are brought to the US. The report identifies six Department of Defense [...]
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled Wednesday that the ritual slaughter of animals violates the Polish Constitution. The court’s ruling will bar strictly-followed slaughtering practices by Muslim and Jewish citizens where the animal is not stunned first. The decision conflicts with a 2009 EU law , scheduled to go into effect this January, that regulates slaughtering procedures [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Chibli Mallat of the Yale Law School says that a recent decree issued by Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is unconstitutional and must be struck down by the judiciary in order to preserve the country’s democratic revolution…
JURIST Columnist Paul Johnson, Anniversary Reader at the University of York, in the first of two pieces on laws pertaining to homosexual acts in Dependencies of the UK, argues that male, homosexual-specific criminal offenses in Guernsey should be modernized to parallel the laws of the UK…
The Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Thursday acquitted former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) commanders Ramush Haradinaj , Idriz Balaj, and Laji Brahimaj of all charges. Haradinaj was a commander of the KLA in the Dukagjin area of Western Kosovo; Balaj, a commander of a special operations unit [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Wednesday stayed a lower court ruling that would have forced Argentina to pay $1.3 billion to one of its creditors, the investment fund NML Capital Ltd. . The Second Circuit blocked a decision by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York [...]
An Egyptian court on Wednesday sentenced in absentia seven Coptic Christians and an American preacher to death on charges stemming from an anti-Muslim film, Innocence of Muslims , which sparked violent protests in the Middle East earlier this year. The death sentences are primarily symbolic, as all of the defendants live outside of Egypt and [...]
The Third Committee of the UN General Assembly on Tuesday adopted a resolution expressing concern for continuing human rights violations in Iran. The committee specifically mentioned that Iran is using torture, inhumane treatment of prisoners, public executions, executions of minors, hanging as an execution method, targeting of human rights defenders, and discrimination and violence against [...]
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in Henderson v. United States on appellate review for plain error. The question before the court was whether, under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 52(b) , an appellate court reviewing a trial court decision for “plain error,” when a matter of law was unsettled at the time [...]
Two privacy advocacy groups wrote a letter on Monday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to withdraw recently announced proposed changes to the site’s governance documents. The letter, signed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) , noted that some of the changes directly affected the company’s [...]
