Turkish President Abdullah Gul on Thursday criticized the country's ban on several Google services, calling for officials to find a legal way to restore access. Gul, in messages posted to his Twitter account , expressed his disapproval of the bans, calling for them to be lifted. Article 5651 of the Turkish penal code allows the [...]
Ekaterina Sivolobova, a student in the Faculty of Law at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, writes about the problem of legal impunity in Uruguay… Without a doubt, legal impunity is a problem affecting Latin America. Most South American states have issued amnesty laws that prevent the investigation of human rights violations committed during dictatorships. [...]
US President Barack Obama on Thursday called for new oil pollution laws in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill . Speaking at a meeting of congressional leaders from both political parties, Obama emphasized the need to update the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 , a piece of legislation that was passed in [...]
New York City reached a settlement Thursday with the 10,000 rescue and cleanup workers who became sick or injured from responding to the 9/11 attacks . The agreement follows two failed settlement attempts between the parties. The city's insurer, WTC Captive Insurance Company , has agreed to pay the plaintiffs $712.5 million, up from its [...]
The Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday upheld a defendant's right to a publication ban that applies to the evidence and information produced at a bail hearing. Canadian media organizations have claimed that the statutory ban, codified under § 517 of Canada's criminal code , is a direct violation of the freedom of expression guaranteed [...]
Forty-three countries on Wednesday announced their support for a new set of guidelines to ensure a more diligent effort is made to return real property seized by the Nazis during the Holocaust to its rightful owners or heirs. The guidelines, first proposed at last year's Holocaust Era Assets Conference , are legally non-binding, but are [...]
A panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Wednesday ruled that the city could withhold documents related to the arrest of 1,800 protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention. In granting the city's petition for a writ of mandamus , the appeals court held that the lower court had abused [...]
Several human rights and civil liberties groups on Wednesday filed a formal complaint with the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) calling for an official investigation into a recent report alleging that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engaged in illegal human experimentation as part of the Bush administration's enhanced interrogation program. The techniques used by [...]
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Thursday convicted seven senior Bosnian Serb officials of war crimes against Bosnian Muslims committed during the 1995 Srebrenica massacre . Military security chiefs Vujadin Popovic and Ljubisa Beara were convicted of genocide, extermination, murder and persecution and sentenced to life imprisonment. Security chief Zvornik Brigade [...]
A Colombian judge on Wednesday issued a landmark judgment against army colonel Luis Alfonso Plazas Vega for the forced disappearance of 11 people after the 1985 hostage situation at the Palace of Justice in Bogota, sentencing him to 30 years in prison. The palace siege was one of the deadliest incidents during the decades of [...]
