A Milan court on Monday ordered Italian authorities to release former Guantanamo Bay detainee Abdel Ben Mabrouk , finding that the eight years Mabrouk served at Guantanamo and the year he spent in an Italian prison were sufficient punishment. The judge handed Mabrouk a two-year suspended sentence for terrorist association based on recommendations from Mabrouk’s [...]
Bank of America (BOA) has reached a $410 million settlement in a class action suit accusing the bank of excessive overdraft fees, according to documents submitted Friday in the US District Court Southern District of Florida . BOA is among more than two dozen US, Canadian and European lenders named as defendants in the class [...]
Christian Ohanian, University of North Carolina (UNC) Chapel-Hill Law ’11, is a certified legal student at the University of North Carolina’s Immigration and Human Rights Policy Clinic. He writes about the difficulty confronting asylum applicants from politically controversial states… Iraq has been embroiled in sectarian violence and general social upheaval since the United States’ invasion [...]
Prosecutors and defense attorneys in the US District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania on Monday began selecting the jury in the corruption trial of former Pennsylvania judge Mark Ciavarella for his role in a juvenile sentencing scandal . Ciavarella, a former judge in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas, is accused of [...]
The UK’s top civil servant reported Monday that the previous administration “ all it could” to facilitate a Libyan appeal to allow for the release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmet al-Megrahi from a Scottish prison, but that the decision-making power was solely within the province of the Scottish Government. Megrahi, a former Libyan [...]
UN rights experts called Monday for all global communities to participate in the effort to end female genital mutilation (FGM) . The statement, marking the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Genital Mutilation and Cutting, encourages abandonment of the practice that has long-term health effects and is, according to the UN officials, a clear violation [...]
A total of 98.83 percent of nearly 3.8 million southern Sudanese voters voted in favor of secession in last month’s Southern Sudan’s Independence Referendum, according to the final polling results released Monday by the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission . After the official results were announced in the northern capital of Khartoum, Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir [...]
The Amsterdam District Court began the new trial of right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders Monday after replacing the previous panel of judges. The replacement panel will now hear the case against Wilders, which stems from charges that he made inflammatory statements against Islam, calling the religion “fascist” and comparing the Koran to Hitler’s book Mein [...]
UK think tank Policy Exchange called Monday for the UK to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in favor of a domestic high court. Senior UK judge, Lord Leonard Hoffman, wrote the foreword, saying the “Strasbourg court has taken upon itself an extraordinary power to micromanage the legal systems of the member [...]
The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the European Center for Human Rights (ECCHR) on Monday urged the signatory states of the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT) to pursue criminal charges against former US president George W. Bush . The call came as the rights groups announced that two criminal complaints were to be filed [...]
