A court in Montenegro on Wednesday sentenced four former Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) soldiers to up to four years in prison for war crimes committed during the Croatian conflict. In a retrial of a 2010 case, the court found the four defendants guilty of torturing prisoners at a detention camp in Morinj between 1991 and [...]
The United Nations (UN) on Wednesday refused to replace a judge presiding over investigations at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) after Cambodia attempted to block him. Laurent Kasper-Ansermet is the judge tasked with investigating two possible suspects believed to be involved in the deaths of around 1.7 million people during the [...]
A group of Maldives lawyers this week submitted to the International Criminal Court (ICC) the controversial case of detained Maldives Judge Abdulla Mohamed, calling Mohamed’s continued detention a violation of the International Convention on the Protection of all Persons against Enforced Disappearance . The legal team is contesting the conditions of Mohamed’s arrest and subsequent [...]
A federal judge in the US District Court for the District of Montana on Friday ruled that the state’s medical marijuana law does not protect providers of the drug from federal prosecution. Judge Donald Molloy dismissed a civil lawsuit brought by 14 medical marijuana providers who had all been raided by federal authorities in the [...]
The Humanitarian Law Center (HLC) , a Serbian human rights group, alleged on Tuesday that Serbian General Ljubisa Dikovic committed war crimes in 1998 and 1999 during the war in Kosovo . The HLC pointed to evidence uncovered during the trial of former Serbian president Milan Milutinovic by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former [...]
Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) announced Tuesday that Eygpt’s state of emergency that has been in effect for nearly 30 years would be lifted later this week. Tantawi did indicate that some of the powers from the state of emergency would remain in effect against certain [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Mary Ziegler of Saint Louis University School of Law says that a recent decision by Fifth Circuit gives broad support for laws requiring physicians to provide certain information to patients requesting an abortion, and that this represents a shift in the debate over abortion rights from discussions of a “right to life” [...]
The Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled Monday that a trial court must review a lawsuit challenging a Minnesota law prohibiting gay marriage . The plaintiffs are three same-sex couples who were married in Canada and had been denied marriage licenses by Minnesota due to a statewide ban on same-sex marriage . Plaintiffs argued that Minnesota [...]
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Tuesday condemned Iraq’s execution of 34 individuals, including two women, last week. All 34 executions occurred on a single day for crimes described as terrorism-related offenses . Iraq maintains the death penalty for even non-fatal crimes, but there has been no report of a single case [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Monday upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by US citizen and convicted terrorist Jose Padilla , who alleged that he had been illegally detained at a military jail in South Carolina. Claiming nominal monetary redress against Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former secretary [...]
