JURIST Special Guest Columnist Brian Concannon Jr., Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, says that although the political prisoners lingering in Haiti's squalid jails are not the byproduct of the policies of incoming President René Préval, they are certainly his problem, drawing criticism with each passing day not only from international [...]
In re: Vioxx Products Liability Litigation, Barnett v. Merck & Co., US District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana, August 30, 2006 . Read the full text of the ruling . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
Scotland Yard received a final one-week extension from a High Court judge in London Wednesday, permitting British police to detain and question five British Muslim men suspected in connection with an alleged terror plot to blow up US-bound planes over the Atlantic for an additional seven days before they must either charge the suspects with [...]
UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland condemned Israel Wednesday for its "immoral" use of cluster bombs in the most recent Middle East conflict . Egeland based his criticism on UN officials' recent discovery of 359 separate sites of cluster bomblets, saying that 90% of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours [...]
National Resources Defense Council v. Environmental Protection Agency et al., United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, August 29, 2006 . Read the full text of the ruling . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
The US Marine Corps Wednesday held separate hearings preliminary to possible court-martial at Camp Pendleton , California, for two of the eight American soldiers, including seven Marines and one Navy corpsman, charged with the April 26 murder and kidnapping of an Iraqi man in the town of Hamdania. The eight men allegedly dragged the man [...]
A district court in Tokyo Wednesday dismissed an action filed on behalf of eight Chinese women who claim they were forced to act as sex slaves, or "comfort women" , for Japanese soldiers during World War II. The plaintiffs, teenagers during the war, sought both monetary compensation and an apology from the Japanese government, and [...]
US District Judge Eldon E. Fallon of the Eastern District of Louisiana on Wednesday threw out a jury verdict holding Merck liable for $50 million in compensatory damages to a retired FBI agent who claimed Merck's painkiller Vioxx caused his heart attack. Fallon called the jury award "grossly excessive" and ordered a new trial to [...]
A Bolivian constitutional convention championed by President Evo Morales has delayed voting on a motion that would allow the assembly to create a constitutional framework without having to answer to Congress or the judiciary. Tuesday's delay results from disputes between delegates from Morales' Movement Toward Socialism party (MAS) , but a vote could occur later [...]
The Santiago Court of Appeals has temporarily removed Judge Carlos Cerda from presiding over a probe into the finances of former Chile dictator Augusto Pinochet , after hearing arguments that Cerda has a "personal bias" against Pinochet. Pinochet's lawyer had argued that Cerda demonstrated his bias towards Pinochet by voting against Pinochet in a previous [...]
