Humans Right Watch urged the Chinese government Sunday to be more transparent about its practice of removing transplant organs from executed prisoners after Vice Minister of Health Huang Jiefu admitted for the first time at a medical conference last week that most organs take from cadavers for transplants come from there "apart from a small [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Benjamin Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law says that despite recent disparaging comments by US Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff, international law is also American law, and we must respect our obligations as citizens of the international community, not arbitrarily dismiss or avoid them so as to facilitate torture of [...]
Democratic Republic of Congo Vice President Jean-Pierre Bemba filed an anticipated challenge to the results of last month's presidential run-off election in the country's Supreme Court Saturday. Congolese military personnel and UN peacekeeping forces surrounded the high court building in downtown Kinshasa as a precaution against rioting. Officials announced Wednesday that Bemba lost the election [...]
About 300 protesters demonstrated Saturday in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia , calling for a US retrial of Khalid Adem, a Ethiopian immigrant to the United States who earlier this month was convicted of circumcising his daughter in 2001. In what was believed to be the first US case of its kind, a Georgia [...]
Texas US District Judge Ewing Werlein Jr. sentenced former Enron executives Michael Kopper and Mark Koenig to 37- and 18-month prison terms respectively Friday for their role in the corporate scandal. The sentences for both men were reduced at the request of prosecuting attorneys in return for the defendants' testimony against other former Enron executives [...]
US District Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern District of California ruled Friday that he will allow a class action lawsuit filed against the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program to go forward while a prior motion to dismiss the case is on appeal. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) brought the class action wiretapping lawsuit against [...]
The US Department of Defense (DOD) announced Friday that it had released three detainees from Guantanamo Bay who Combatant Status Review Tribunals had determined not to be enemy combatants . The US Department of State said later that the government of Albania has agreed to accept and resettle the three, identified as an Algerian national, [...]
Vice President Dick Cheney told the Federalist Society annual meeting in Washington Friday that the Bush administration plans to continue nominating conservative judges to the federal courts notwithstanding new Democratic control of Congress and expectations on both sides of the aisle that more moderate candidates might be put forward after the mid-term elections. "Federal judges," [...]
US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff warned the national convention of the conservative Federalist Society in a speech Friday that international law was increasingly being used as a "rhetorical weapon" against the United States and urged members of his audience to "confront…the rise of an increasingly activist, left-wing, and even elitist philosophy of law that [...]
The Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party of Bolivian President Evo Morales gained more power to rewrite the country's constitution over the objections of opposing political parties Friday when Bolivia's constitutional assembly approved a motion to make decisions by majority vote. The measure gives the MAS, which failed to receive two-thirds of the assembly seats in [...]
