Richard C. Dieter : "Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed in a hail of bullets as he sat strapped to a chair in a Utah prison a few nights ago. Gardner got the kind of execution he wanted–death by firing squad–and Utah finally got what it wanted–retribution for the murder Gardner had committed twenty-five years ago. [...]
The Mexican government on Tuesday filed an amicus curiae brief with the US District Court for the District of Arizona asking that the recently passed Arizona immigration law be declared unconstitutional. The brief was filed in support of the petitioners in a class action lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) [...]
The 2010 Failed States Index was released Monday, describing state failure as a "chronic condition" after finding that the same group of countries have occupied the top 10 spots as failed states for the last six years. The index is published by Foreign Policy Magazine (FP) and the Fund for Peace and uses publicly available [...]
A judge for the US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana on Tuesday ordered a preliminary injunction against a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling issued last month by the Obama administration in response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill . The suit was filed by small oil companies in Louisiana affected by [...]
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Tuesday appointed a three-member panel to investigate allegations of human rights abuses during the last months of the Sri Lankan civil war . The panel will be investigating alleged wartime abuses of civilians by both the Sri Lankan government and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the [...]
US lawyer and JURIST Forum contributor Peter Erlinder returned to the US Tuesday after spending 21 days in a Rwandan prison. Upon his return, Erlinder stated his belief that had he not requested to contact the US embassy shortly before his detention, he would not have survived . He also said that he was on [...]
The Israeli Supreme Court on Tuesday overturned jail sentences for 13 ultra-Orthodox Jewish mothers charged with contempt for disobeying a court order on school integration in the West Bank settlement of Immanuel. The court delayed jail sentences for an additional nine mothers in order to allow the women to care for their families while their [...]
The Afghan Office of the President announced Tuesday that the UN will gradually begin to remove Taliban officials who have renounced al Qaeda from the organization's blacklist . The blacklist freezes assets and limits travel of senior figures linked to the Taliban. The announcement followed a meeting in Kabul between diplomats from the UN Security [...]
The Australian government reinstated its Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) in the Northern Territory on Tuesday after the Senate approved the legislation as part of a Social Security Act late Monday. The discrimination laws were suspended by the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act (NTER) in 2007 in order to allow governmental authorities to regulate how [...]
A Zimbabwean court on Monday denied bail to human rights activist Farai Maguwu, who is being held for allegedly supplying false information about Zimbabwe's controversial diamond mining practices to the international diamond control body the Kimberley Process (KP) . In denying the bail request, Judge Chinembiri Bhunu of the Harare High Court cited the severity [...]
