A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Thursday upheld an earlier ruling by a federal district court to vacate the conviction of former Enron CFO Kevin Howard . District Judge Vanessa Gilmore had vacated Howard's conviction in light of an August 2006 opinion by the Fifth Circuit that [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says that the rules of evidence governing the recently announced military commission trials of six alleged al Qaeda members, combined with the Bush administration's efforts to sanitize the legal mess made by the use of illegal interrogation methods, ensure that the trials will fall [...]
Memorandum Order: Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah et al., v. George W. Bush et al., US District Court for the District of Columbia, February 14, 2008 . Read the full text of the order . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
A Chinese land rights activist arrested for circulating a petition declaring "we want human rights, not the Olympics" will be tried next week, according to Thursday media reports. Yang Chunlin was arrested in July 2007 and charged with "inciting subversion of state power" after obtaining over 10,000 signatures on a petition that said improving human [...]
Chadian President Idriss Deby Thursday declared a state of emergency throughout Chad , citing increased violence between government forces and rebels in the capital city of N'Djamena. The order bans most public meetings, imposes a curfew, authorizes government censorship of the press, and allows regional governments to regulate travel. Under Article 87 of Chad's constitution [...]
US District Judge Richard W. Roberts Thursday extended the deadline for the government to comply with an order issued last month requiring it to submit a report to the court by February 14 detailing why the CIA destroyed videotapes showing the interrogation of terror suspects , whether other evidence connected to a lawsuit filed by [...]
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and opposition candidate Raila Odinga Thursday agreed to write a new constitution, an agreement that could put an end to the violence that erupted in the wake of January's disputed presidential election . A spokesman for former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan , who is currently in the country to help mediate [...]
The US House of Representatives voted Thursday to hold former White House legal counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten in contempt for failing to cooperate with an inquiry into the US Attorneys firing scandal . Members of the House voted 223-32 to issue contempt citations for Miers for failing to [...]
Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) is not doing enough to promote remedies and reforms needed to end abuses, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a report released Wednesday. After examining the commission's work on more than 40 human rights cases, HRW said that CNDH often fails to push for accountability for human rights abuses [...]
Acting head of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) Office of Legal Counsel Steven G. Bradbury testified at a US House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties hearing Thursday that the use of waterboarding has been barred by measures enacted since it the interrogation technique was used on three terror detainees [...]
