The UN Human Rights Council held its first Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Monday, reviewing the human rights record of Bahrain. Under the UPR, the 47-member Council will systematically investigate the human rights situations in all 192 UN member nations. Bahrain's review focused on issues relating to foreign workers, freedom of expression and gender equality. The [...]
A High Court judge in Harare said Monday that the court has jurisdiction to hear a lawsuit seeking a court order to compel the Zimbabwean Electoral Commission (ZEC) to immediately release the results of the nation's March 29 presidential elections, but refused to issue an immediate ruling in the case. Instead, the judge scheduled further [...]
The Belfast High Court on Monday heard arguments in a civil lawsuit against five suspected Real IRA members accused of involvement in the deadly 1998 Omagh bombing , in which a car loaded with explosives killed 29 people and wounded 220 on a busy shopping street in the Northern Ireland town. Six families whose relatives [...]
A district court in the Netherlands on Monday rejected the Dutch Islamic Federation's efforts to prevent anti-Quran statements by right-wing lawmaker Geert Wilders . The court said that that Wilders' controversial statements against Islam and the Quran are protected by the right of free expression and do not constitute speech that incites hate or violence. [...]
A former Nigerien slave appeared before the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) Monday, alleging that the government of Niger failed to fully enforce a 2003 law criminalizing the ownership of slaves. Hadijatou Mani Koraou, sold into slavery at the age of 12 in 1996, accuses the Nigerien [...]
JURIST Special Guest Columnist Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney of the Guantanamo project at the Center for Constitutional Rights, says that the recently-released 2003 DOJ memo on military interrogations written by then deputy assistant attorney general John Yoo was no exercise in blue-sky hypothesizing, but rather one of a series of key government memos – [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist John Cerone of New England School of Law says that while we are accustomed to seeing the US president wrap himself in the US flag to avoid the restraints of international law, his posture in recent cases reveals that he occasionally dons the UN banner as well, perhaps for inverse purposes…. Earlier [...]
Sabin P. Willett : "For years, lawyers for Guantanamo detainees have argued that the "evidence" on which their clients were held is remarkably flimsy. On Friday, April 4, 2008, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit got its first close look at the proposition, hearing arguments in Parhat v. Gates, [...]
The Harare High Court on Sunday postponed until Monday its decision on whether it will order Zimbabwe's Electoral Commission to release the results of the nation's March 29 presidential elections, after hearing arguments in a lawsuit brought by opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) seeking immediate release of the results. Independent observers say that [...]
The Iraqi Council of Representatives will likely consider this week two new draft reform bills attempting to solidify the nation's oil law , Energy Committee Chairman Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani said Saturday. Under the first draft law, the state-run and government-funded Iraqi National Oil Company will be reestablished to operate alongside the North Oil Company and South [...]
