Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday condemned violence by Guinea’s security forces in response to recent opposition demonstrations. Rising tensions amid allegations of fraud and repeated delays leading up to the run-off presidential election erupted in violence last week. Police allegedly fired indiscriminately at unarmed civilians, beat protesters and ransacked homes. [...]
The International Criminal Court (ICC) requested Monday that Kenya arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir when he visits the country later this week. Al-Bashir faces seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as three charges of genocide in relation to the Darfur conflict . The ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber I has requested: the [...]
The Republic of Azerbaijan must free its imprisoned journalists and repeal its criminal defamation laws , Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released Tuesday. In its 94-page report, entitled “Beaten, Blacklisted, and Behind Bars: The Vanishing Space for Freedom of Expression in Azerbaijan,” HRW cited numerous instances of violence against journalists and said [...]
A group of Spanish police officers went on trial Tuesday for the alleged torture of two ETA activists in Basque. The alleged victims, Igor Portu and Mattin Sarasola, were convicted and sentenced to 1,040 years in prison after an airport bombing in Madrid that killed two people. They claim that the police mistreated them physically [...]
The California Supreme Court on Monday upheld the dismissal of 18 criminal cases in Riverside County because there were not enough judges available to hear the cases. The Superior Court of Riverside County, a California state trial court, has been heavily burdened with criminal cases in recent years, with nearly 25 percent of jail inmates [...]
Somalia was once again ranked the most corrupt country by Transparency International (TI) in its 2010 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) released Tuesday. The CPI measures the abuse of entrusted power for private gain in both the public and private spheres. Countries are ranked from 10 (very clean) to 0 (highly corrupt) based on survey information [...]
The UK Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that Scottish police can no longer question a suspect in custody without the presence of a lawyer. The court found that the previous law, which permitted interrogation of suspects without a lawyer for up to six hours, violated the Article 6 right to a fair trial of the European [...]
Former Iraqi foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Saddam Hussein , Tariq Aziz , was sentenced to death Tuesday by the Iraqi High Criminal Court . The court sentenced Aziz to death by hanging on charges related to the former regime’s effort to eliminate Shiite Muslim resistance efforts after the First Gulf War. Aziz [...]
The US District Court for the Southern District of New York denied a request Monday for documents regarding the detention and treatment of prisoners being held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Judge Barbara Jones granted summary judgment for the government, denying the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) access to the documents under the Freedom [...]
Digital security company Gemalto announced Monday that it has filed a lawsuit against HTC, Samsung Electronics, Motorola and Google , as well as some of those companies’ US subsidiaries, based on the use and sale of the Android operating system and the Dalvik Virtual Machine , which Gemalto claims infringe on a patent held by [...]
