The specially-established Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission on Monday awarded damages "resulting from violations of international law" that occurred during the nations' 1998-2000 border war. The five-person panel established under the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague awarded USD $174,036,520 to Ethiopia and $161,455,000 to Eritrea , not including an additional $2,065,865 granted to individual Eritrean [...]

The US Department of State (DOS) on Monday announced that it has sent a report to Congress that gives a favorable opinion of Mexico's recent human rights record, paving the way for US aid to the country. The report outlines Mexico's progress in addressing a variety of human rights issues as part of the Merida [...]

Former Credit Suisse broker Eric Butler was convicted Monday of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York . His co-defendant Julian Tzolov pleaded guilty last month and testified against Butler. Butler and Tzolov are accused of defrauding clients out of more than $400 million [...]

The Scottish High Court of the Judiciary on Tuesday accepted a request from convicted Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi to withdraw a pending appeal to his 2001 conviction. The court's decision to drop the appeal removes an impediment to Megrahi's petition to serve the remainder of his sentence in his [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued a confidential ruling last week denying a habeas corpus petition by Guantanamo Bay detainee Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, the Miami Herald reported Monday. Yemeni native Ali Awad was detained following a skirmish and standoff outside a hospital in Afghanistan in 2002 and [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the execution of death row inmate Jason Getsy. The Court also declined Getsy's petition for review. This was the first decision for newly sworn in Justice Sonia Sotomayor , who would have stayed the execution, along with Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruther Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen [...]

A Swiss court has denied an appeal by the family of former Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier to claim money hidden in Swiss banks by Duvalier while he led the island nation. The family's claim was rejected by the Federal Criminal Court of Switzerland , because the family could not prove that the money had come [...]

Niger's opposition parties on Monday announced that they would resist any effort to implement a new constitution expanding executive powers, which was approved by Nigerien voters earlier this month and validated by the country's Constitutional Court on Friday. Human rights activist Abdul Kamardine said that "civil societies are joining hands with the political opposition" to [...]

Honduran Interim Deputy Foreign Minister Martha Alvarado said Monday that she expects a biased report from the international panel that arrived Monday to investigate alleged human rights abuses. A delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH), which is part of the Organization of American States (OAS) , arrived in the Honduran capital of [...]

An international coalition of human rights advocates have urged UN member nations to support a "competitive, genuinely-contested and principled electoral process" for future seats on the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) . In a letter sent Thursday to members of the General Assembly, 74 human rights groups including Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International (AI) [...]