UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Wednesday urged the government of Honduras to take measures to address the violence against human rights defenders. The call came amid two recent killings of lawyers working on human rights cases in the country. The lawyer who worked for defending peasant groups in land conflicts matters [...]
The Hulhumale Magistrate Court in the Maldives has issued an order preventing ex-president Mohamed Nasheed from leaving the capital of Male without official permission. Nasheed was also served with unnamed criminal proceedings. Nasheed supporters claimed that this move was politically motivated and will limit the ex-president’s ability to campaign for the next election. This order [...]
Zainab al-Khawaja, the daughter of Bahraini human rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja , was sentenced Wednesday to two months in prison for tearing up a picture of the country’s king, according to her lawyer. Mohammed al-Jishi condemned the sentence as being too harsh, stating that penalties for such offenses are usually mere fines. Zainab still faces [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Tung Yin of the Lewis & Clark Law School argues that Attorney General Eric Holder should have given some explanation for his decision to refrain from prosecuting any suspects after spending years investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s abuse of interrogation methods that led to the deaths of at least two detainees…
JURIST Guest Columnist Gerard Dondero, University of Nevada William S. Boyd School of Law Class of 2013, argues that while the recent New York district court decision in US v. Dicristina represents a change in the legal analysis of games of skill, most US states still utilize outdated judicial standards to evaluate gambling… A recent [...]
A Brazilian state court on Wednesday gave YouTube 10 days to remove from its website a film deemed offensive to Muslims. The court order follows a recent lawsuit brought by Muslim group National Islamic Union against Youtube’s parent company Google asserting that the movie violates their freedom of religion . In his injunction, Judge Gilson [...]
Uruguay’s Chamber of Deputies voted on Tuesday to legalize abortion in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, subject to several conditions, by a vote of 50-49. Cuba and Mexico are the only other countries in the region that have decriminalized abortion . A woman would have to go before a gynecologist, psychologist and a social [...]
The Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) on Tuesday found three members of Sierra Leone’s former Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) guilty of contempt . Santigie Borbor Kanu and Hassan Papa Bangura were convicted of two counts of “interfering with the administration of justice by offering a bribe to a witness” and for attempting to [...]
The German Federal Ministry of Justice (BMJ) on Tuesday outlined a plan to legalize circumcisions of infant boys after a controversial ruling banning the practice was handed down earlier this year. The Cologne state court ruled in June that circumcising young boys based on religious traditions is prohibited even if the parents consent to the [...]
Independent UN human rights Rita Izsak called Wednesday for Bosnia and Herzgovina (BIH) to do more to promote minority rights and unity. Izsak emphasized the need to encourage integration among the minority groups at all levels of society, specifically when dealing with education. She discussed the potential linguistic restraints in educating the groups together, but [...]
