The Saddam Hussein trial resumed in Baghdad on Monday, though the former Iraqi leader was not in court due to his weekend hospitalization after collapsing in jail on the sixteenth day of his hunger strike protesting trial court procedures and a lack of adequate security for defense lawyers. Defense closing arguments were scheduled to continue [...]
An American Bar Association Task Force on Presidential Signing Statements and the Separation of Powers Doctrine has determined that President Bush's practice of attaching signing statements to new laws "undermine the rule of law and our constitutional system of separation of powers." In a report and recommendations to be released Monday, the task force found [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Lynn Wardle of J. Reuben Clark School of Law at Brigham Young University says that the 2006 House and Senate votes on the Federal Marriage Protection Amendment may not have been sufficient to send the amendment to the states for ratification, but they do show that the movement to protect marriage as [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University School of Law, a former defense counsel for war crimes suspects, says that both Hezbollah and Israel are guilty of committing war crimes in the latest Middle East conflict… The laws of war are divided into two categories that I often get mixed up because of the [...]
JURIST Special Guest Columnists Gaby El Hakim and Joe Karam, Lebanese lawyers and board members of the Beirut Bar Association, say indiscriminate Israeli attacks on Lebanese civilians violate all principles of international humanitarian law and call for an immediate ceasefire and concerted negotiations to end the violence and restore a fully-sovereign Lebanon… In the past [...]
Andrew Wood : "With the Khmer Rouge tribunal beginning in less than a year, Phnom Penh is buzzing in anticipation of the proceedings. Preparation for the tribunal has been nearly a decade in the making. Although Pol Pot died in 1999, several other former Khmer Rouge leaders are expected to be indicted and held responsible [...]
"No Blood, No Foul:" Soldiers' Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq, Human Rights Watch, July 23, 2006 . Read the full text of the report. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
Touring south Beirut Sunday, United Nations relief coordinator Jan Egeland said the damage to civilian areas caused by Israeli airstrikes was worse than he had anticipated and reemphasized that attacking civilians was illegal under intrenational norms. "It is horrific. I did not know it was block after block of houses… It seems to be an [...]
US military commanders in Iraq regularly authorized torture and abusive interrogation practices even in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal , and military lawyers brought in to brief interrogators erroneously told them that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to their detainees, according to a new Human Rights Watch report released Sunday. The report, [...]
Less than half of lawyers hired to work in the US Department of Justice Civil Rights Division since 2003 have a background in civil rights, according to resumes obtained by the Boston Globe through a Freedom of Information Act request. In late 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft changed hiring procedures throughout the department, replacing traditional [...]
