Last month's constitutional referendum in Myanmar approving a new national charter put forward by the military has effectively "washed away" any mandate to govern claimed by opposition party National League for Democracy (NLD), state-run newspaper New Light of Myanmar said Tuesday. The NLD, led by Aung San Suu Kyi , won the 1990 general elections [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) Tuesday called on China to release the remaining imprisoned Tiananmen Square protesters as part of a wider effort to improve the nation's human rights image before the 2008 Olympic Games. HRW urged the government to reverse its official 1989 classification of the protests as a "counterrevolutionary rebellion", release a complete list [...]
The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal Monday heard an Islamic advocacy group's allegations that a 2006 article published in Canadian news magazine Maclean's discriminated against Muslims. Mohamed Elmasry and Naiyer Habib, members of the Canadian Islamic Conference (CIC) , allege that the article, written by Canadian author Mark Steyn and entitled "The future belongs to [...]
Voters in two rural Bolivian states Sunday voted in favor of autonomy measures that would allow the provincial governments to form legislatures, gather police forces and become more independent of national control. Bolivian President Evo Morales characterized the referenda in Beni and Pando as an illegal and unconstitutional effort to undo reforms aiding the nation's [...]
Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) leaders said Tuesday that it will likely take months for parliament to pass a proposed constitutional amendment package that would restore the judiciary deposed by President Musharraf and limit executive powers. Some top Pakistani lawmakers expressed skepticism that the measures would be approved at all. A [...]
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev Monday encouraged the Russian parliament to reject a bill that would allow officials to close media outlets suspected of spreading libel or slander. The measure, which passed the parliament's first reading by an overwhelming majority on April 25, would amend Russian media law , expanding the definition of libel to "dissemination [...]
Carrie Cecil, Pitt Law '10, files from Kiev: I've been in Kiev for a little over a week, and every day something new in the landscape amuses or intrigues me, ranging from the incredible amount of cranes all over the city due to the lack of effective zoning to the incredibly long escalators rising out [...]
A California ballot initiative that would amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage is set to appear on the November ballot, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen said Monday. If approved by voters, the California Marriage Protection Act would amend the state constitution to read, "nly marriage between a man and a woman is [...]
A Chinese official has dismissed a new US report on the state of Chinese human rights, calling it incorrect and groundless . Findings in the US Department of State's 2008 Advancing Freedom and Democracy Reports , released late last month, accuse the Chinese government of denying its citizens basic human rights and also describe the [...]
The judges of the Constitutional Court of South Africa have filed a complaint with the country's judicial disciplinary body, the Judicial Service Commission (JSC) , alleging that the top judge in the Cape High Court unconstitutionally attempting to influence Constitutional Court judges in a pending corruption case against African National Congress (ANC) leader Jacob Zuma [...]
