Andrew Hudson : "The conviction of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori for serious human rights violations is groundbreaking on a number of levels. First, not only was a former head of state found guilty of crimes against humanity, but his conviction came at the hands of a court is his own nation. The Peruvian Court [...]
Mohammad Asif Mohseni, a key Shi'ite cleric in Afghanistan, defended a controversial law Saturday that critics say limits women's rights in the country. The measure, called the Shi'ite Personal Status Law , was signed into law last month by President Hamid Karzai , but the law has yet to be published. Opponents of the law [...]
A federal judge ruled Friday that investors who lost money in Bernard Madoff's alleged Ponzi scheme can force Madoff into personal bankruptcy to recover lost funds. The ruling from Judge Louis Stanton of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York removes a restriction on Madoff's bankruptcy that was established by Stanton [...]
Commodore Josaia Voreqe "Frank" Bainimarama , the head of the Fijian military, was reappointed Saturday as prime minister of the country by President Ratu Josefa Iloilo a day after Iloilo suspended the country's constitution following a Thursday ruling by the Fiji Court of Appeals that declared Bainimarama's original appointment as prime minister unconstitutional. Bainimarama led [...]
The administration of US President Barack Obama will appeal a ruling made last week by Judge John Bates of the US District Court for the District of Columbia that allowed detainees being held by the US in Afghanistan to proceed with habeas corpus challenges to their detention. Word of the appeal came Friday in a [...]
Frank Smyth : "There is nothing that repressive regimes like more than pointing the finger at someone else. Nearly four years ago, after journalists including Judith Miller then of The New York Times were jailed for refusing to reveal sources in response to federal subpoenas, senior government officials in other nations from Venezuela to Cameroon [...]
The US Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) denied Friday the emergency stay of deportation filed by accused Nazi prison camp guard John Demjanjuk . In March, a Munich district court charged Demjanjuk with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder for his alleged involvement at the Sobibor concentration camp. Demjanjuk had filed the emergency stay of [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Friday refused a petition for an en banc rehearing by former Ukranian prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko , who had been on trial for money laundering and embezzling, allowing several of his convictions to stand. In September, the appeals court vacated Lazarenko's nine-year sentence , setting [...]
A New York state appeals court ruled Thursday that a same-sex partner lacks standing to assert parental rights over the biological child of her partner unless she has adopted the child. The ruling limits parental rights under NY Domestic Relations Law § 70 to biological or adoptive parents, following precedent set in the 1991 case [...]
Advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called on Uganda to end what it said was the use of torture and unlawful arrest by the country's Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force (JATT). According to HRW, JATT engaged in 106 documented cases of illegal or prolonged detentions between August 2008 and February 2009, and employed torture methods against [...]
