A lawsuit was filed Tuesday against BP in a Louisiana state court alleging that the company’s negligent actions led to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and that BP was also negligent in its handling of the cleanup of the oil spill. The plaintiffs contend that BP assumed responsibility for the health and safety of the [...]
The US District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday allowed Canadian Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr to amend his 2004 habeas corpus petition, but refused to lift the stay on the petition pending the conclusion of his military commission. The petition was stayed under a criteria set forth by the US Supreme Court’s [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Bruce Miller of Western New England College School of Law says that the decision of a moderately liberal federal judge that the application of the Defense of Marriage Act in Massachusetts is unconstitutional on federalism grounds is unsurprising… On July 8, Judge Joseph Tauro of the U. S. District Court in Boston [...]
Human rights organization AIDS-Free World on Wednesday renewed calls for an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation into allegations of rape and torture in Zimbabwe prior to the 2008 presidential elections . AIDS-Free World released a report last December, detailing the systematic rape of female supporters of Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) candidate Morgan Tsvangirai by [...]
The appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Wednesday reversed the acquittal of former Kosovo Albanian military leader Ramush Haradinaj and two others. In reversing the acquittal, the appeals chamber ordered a retrial, holding that the trial chamber had erred when it failed to grant the prosecution additional time [...]
Spain’s lower house of parliament, the Congress of Deputies , on Tuesday rejected a proposal to ban the burqa and other full face veils, by a vote of 183 to 162 with 2 abstaining. In June, the Senate approved a motion calling on the Spanish government to ban the use of full face veils in [...]
UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay Tuesday issued a warning about ongoing human rights violations in Kyrgyzstan following the recent ethnic violence in the country. According to Pillay, security forces in the southern part of the country have been arbitrarily detaining large numbers of Uzbeks in violation of both Kyrgz and international laws. Pillay cited [...]
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Tuesday rejected an appeal by a Dutch businessman convicted of selling chemicals used by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to create chemical weapons. Frans Van Anraat was convicted of war crimes in 2005 for selling 1,100 tons of thiodiglycol (TDG) to the Iraqi government in the 1980s, which [...]
The US Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday voted 13-6 to send the Supreme Court nomination of Elena Kagan to the full Senate. The vote divided largely along party lines, with Democrats voting unanimously in favor of sending the nomination forward, joined by one Republican vote. Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) explained his ‘no’ vote by arguing that [...]
The US Department of Defense (DOD) announced Monday that two more detainees have been released from the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Abd-al-Nisr Mohammed Khantumani was released to Cape Verde, while Abdul Aziz Naji was repatriated to his native Algeria. Naji had appealed to the US Supreme Court , asking that it review his pending transfer [...]
