An Italian court in Milan on Monday acquitted four banks charged with failing to have adequate steps to prevent the 2003 Parmalat SpA dairy empire crash. Parmalat collapsed under 14 billion euros in debt and is the largest corporate collapse in Europe. Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America (BOA) were all acquitted [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist David Crane of Syracuse University College of Law says International justice is beginning to require more accountability from heads of state because of new technologies which are beginning to reveal previously undetected war crimes by impious leaders… The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Liaquat Ali Khan of Washburn University School of Law says that the recent events in the US are a continuation of a Western medieval custom of desecrating the Qur’an… The recent Qur’an burning by Pastor Terry Jones, the author of Islam is of the Devil, is the continuation of a Western medieval [...]
Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye was arrested Monday in connection with protests against increasing food and fuel costs. Bloomberg reports Besigye was detained during the protest , while Al Jazeera reports Besigye was arrested on his way to the protest . Besigye has been charged with rioting and inciting violence, but was released on bail [...]
Egyptian prosecutors charged former prime minister Ahmed Nazif, former finance minister Yousef Boutros and former interior minister Habib el Adly with corruption on Sunday. The charges stem from allegations that the three former officials, all of which served under former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak , granted a no-bid contract to a German businessman to sell [...]
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Saturday announced in a televised speech that he will lift emergency laws that have been in place for 48 years. For the past four weeks, tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets each Friday, demanding, in part, that the emergency laws be revoked. The law will be [...]
An Egyptian court on Saturday ordered that the political party of former president Hosni Mubarak be dissolved. It would be illogical for Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, which took control in 1978, to remain an entity, the country’s High Administrative Court said. The court also liquidated the party’s assets. Analysts call the court’s decision an important [...]
Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika on Friday declared an initiative for sweeping constitutional and political reforms in order to increase the role of democracy in the African nation. The announcement, which came in a nationally televised address , was seen as a progressive step for the country in the wake of political protests in the Middle [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Laurie Blank of Emory Law School says the Goldstone “retraction” does not mitigate the report’s damaging effects on the law of war. Among the report’s flaws, it ignored the element of intent for the war crime of intentionally killing civilians, and it failed to condemn Hamas’ endangerment of its own civilians… Justice [...]
Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev on Thursday discharged six justices of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Kazakhstan for corruption. The Kazakh Prosecutor-General’s Office has opened criminal cases against the judges, who are suspected of corruption activity. The Kazakh State Agency for Combating Economic Crimes and Corruption approached Nazarbayev and asked him to remove the [...]
