John Podesta , former White House Chief of Staff under President Bill Clinton and now co-chair of the transition team for US president-elect Barack Obama said in an interview on Fox News Sunday over the weekend that Obama is making plans to issue executive orders to reverse some of the more contentious policies implemented during [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Virginia Keyder, currently teaching European Union law at Bogazici University and Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, says that while the European Commission, aided most recently by the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice, has taken steps to encourage and even mandate increased state data retention for more efficient crime-fighting in [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Michael Kelly of Creighton University School of Law says that not only should the incoming Obama administration close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, it should close down the stigmatized military base as a whole, coverting it into a joint US-Cuban scientific station to monitor and study climate change… Candidate Obama [...]
UN Peacekeeping Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (MUNOC) head Alan Doss on Saturday condemned recent killings of civilians by militias in the country as war crimes. Doss made the statement after MUNOC announced that it had received "credible reports" that civilians had been targeted by militia groups the National Congress for the Defense [...]
Thousands of demonstrators in San Diego and Los Angeles on Saturday protested the passage of Proposition 8 , an amendment to the California constitution making same-sex marriages illegal in the state. The proposition, approved by about 52 percent of California voters last week, provides that "nly marriage between a man and a woman is valid [...]
The British government has revoked the visa of former Thai prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra , and his wife Pojamarn Shinawatra according to media reports Saturday. The couple had been residing in Britain prior to Thaksin's conviction last month on corruption charges related to a 2003 purchase of land by his wife from the government-controlled Financial [...]
The Indonesian attorney general's office Sunday confirmed that three men convicted for the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings which killed 202 people were executed by firing squad just after midnight Saturday local time. The executions were carried out after the Indonesian Supreme Court rejected last-minute appeals filed by relatives of Mukhlas, Imam Smudra, and Amrozi Nurhasyim [...]
Stephen Hanlon : "While the American Bar Association (ABA) takes no position on the death penalty per se, it has called on U.S. capital jurisdictions to halt executions until policies and procedures are implemented to ensure that death penalty cases are administered fairly and impartially and to minimize the risk that innocent persons are executed. [...]
A judge for the US District Court for the District of Oregon has ruled that the US Treasury Department's freezing of the assets of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation violated the organization's due processes rights because it failed to provide any basis for designating it a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" (SDGT) organization. The seizure of the [...]
A court in military-ruled Myanmar on Friday sentenced two lawyers from the National League for Democracy (NLD to four month prison terms for being "disrespectful" while representing dissident students. The US Department of State condemned the prosecutions , calling for the military regime to "cease harassing and arresting citizens for peacefully exercising their internationally recognized [...]
