Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday accused military officials overseen by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki of running a secret jail in Iraq that is not subject to inspection by international groups and torturing suspects in another detention center. The report claims that the Iraqi Army’s 56th Brigade controls the secret prison located in Camp [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Tuesday praised the efforts of Egyptian protesters while repeating concerns over casualties , calling on the nation’s leaders to give citizens the democratic reform they demand. There are currently unconfirmed reports of 300 casualties and 3,000 injured. Citing Article 21 of the of the Universal Declaration [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted summary judgment Monday in favor of the government in CCR v. Obama , ruling that the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) lacked standing to challenge the legality of information obtained by Bush-era warrantless surveillance programs . CCR argued that the Terrorist [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called for an end to police attacks and an investigation into the deaths of protesters in Tunisia. The protest movement in Tunisia ousted former president Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali , sending him into exile, and the UN reported this week that at least 219 have died as a result [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Jordan Paust of University of Houston Law Center says that revolutions occur in different manners around the world, including in the US, and suggests that the US and other members of the UN should change their foreign policies to reflect the values and hopes of the majority of people in an interdependent [...]

Sara Burhan Abdullah, Pitt Law LLM ’08 and JD ’11, was a judge at the Iraqi National Rounds for the Jessup International Moot Court Competition. She shares her impressions of Iraqi students and judges’ performance… I was invited to judge the Iraqi National Rounds for the Jessup International Moot Court Competition, held in December of [...]

French authorities announced Tuesday the identity of a Serbian man arrested a day earlier and suspected of participating in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, where a total of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. Milorad Momic, who has allegedly been living under a false name in France, is a suspected former member of the Serbian [...]

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay , offered technical assistance on Tuesday to Haitian authorities in the prosecution of former Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier for serious human rights violations. Pillay urged prosecutors to move forward, indicating that violations like torture, extrajudicial killings and rape are not subject to a statute of limitations [...]

Dr. Wayne Smith : “U.S.-Cuba relations changed little during 2010, and certainly showed no signs of significant improvement. On the contrary, the two sides seemed to be in something of a stalemate, with the U.S. taking the apparent position that it could not take steps to improve relations until the matter of Alan Gross was [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the District Court for Idaho dismissed a lawsuit Friday brought by environmentalists challenging Idaho’s state-created “roadless rule” to protect its forests. Judge B Lynn Winmill’s ruling upholds Idaho’s plan to manage its 9 million acres of forests across the state. The National Forest Service (NFS) issued the [...]