UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Friday insisted that the Syrian government take steps to protect civilians during armed conflicts. Pillay noted that recent violence in the country has often led to the death of civilians who were not notified that the conflict was approaching their area. Pillay said that although both [...]
A Chinese intermediate court on Friday dismissed fraud charges against Ni Yulan, a human rights lawyer with disabilities, resulting in a two-month reduction to her two-year and eight-month sentence while upholding convictions against the lawyer for causing a disturbance. Ni had assisted victims of government land seizures , including those displaced by the Beijing Olympics [...]
The government of Sri Lanka said Thursday that it may take up to five years to prosecute people accused of war crimes during the 26-year civil war it fought with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) . The government released a timetable on Thursday detailing how it plans to deal with people accused [...]
A German court on Friday granted Microsoft Corp. an injunction against Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility in a patent infringement case involving a technology related to common names for long and short file allocation tables. With the injunction the court in Mannheim also held that Motorola should bear half of the legal costs . The injunction [...]
A government watchdog group Judicial Watch announced on Thursday that they had filed a lawsuit seeking information about the funeral arrangements made for al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden . The US Navy reported last year that Bin Laden was buried at sea in accordance with Muslim tradition within 24 hours of his death. The [...]
The Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ruled 4-3 on Thursday that Pennsylvania’s new oil and gas law violated the state’s constitution by placing zoning rights regarding hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” solely in the hands of state authorities. Fracking is the process of injecting a high pressured mixture of water, sand and chemicals into the ground to break [...]
The Supreme Court of Israel on Friday granted a government request to delay the removal of the Migron outpost in the West Bank . The court had ordered , in a watershed decision in August 2011, that Migron be dismantled by this August, but decided to extend the deadline by three weeks after the government [...]
A spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday expressed concern about the lack of progress being made at a UN conference to negotiate an international Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). With only two days remaining in the UN Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty , Ban expressed concern over the “very limited progress in the [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Geoffrey Hoffman of the University of Houston Law Center says that the Supreme Court’s holding in Arizona v. US serves as a strong reminder of the executive branch’s power to create and enforce a coherent, and ideally compassionate, immigration policy…
Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange filed suit in federal court on Thursday seeking approval of a redistricting plan passed by the Alabama state legislature in May. The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia , asks the court to issue a declaratory judgment approving the plan without going through the [...]
