Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin on Friday signed into law a bill that allows for the use of nitrogen gas in executions if lethal injection is ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court , or if the drugs become unavailable. Under this new method, nitrogen would be delivered via face mask, depriving the inmate of oxygen. [...]
The Legislative Assembly of El Salvador on Thursday approved a measure to amend the constitution to limit marriage and adoption to couples with only one man and one woman. The bill would make same-sex marriages made outside of El Salvador have no legal validity in El Salvador. A similar legislative attempt failed in 2009 . [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Saturday condemned the targeting of the Ibn Khaldun Hospital in Yemen by combatants. Rebel soldiers and pro-government forces fortified near the hospital , and the resulting combat forced the hospital to evacuate all but those receiving emergency treatment in violation of the laws of war, according to HRW. The Geneva [...]
Argentina’s Minister for Issues Relating to the Falkland Islands, Daniel Filmus , announced on Friday the country is beginning legal proceedings against oil and gas companies from the US and UK drilling off of the islands. Filmus claims that extracting resources from the islands is illegal, saying they belong to Argentina, but UK officials have [...]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced a settlement agreement Friday over early voting in Ohio. The now settled lawsuit was filed last year by the ACLU challenging the decreased availability of early voting opportunities in the state as a result of the passage of Senate Bill 238 . The bill eliminated the “golden week,” [...]
Malawi enacted the Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Act of 2015 (Marriage Act) on Wednesday, a move that Human Rights Watch (HRW) welcomed as “an important step toward preventing child marriage.” The act was passed by Parliament in February and approved by President Peter Mutharika this week, setting a minimum marrying age of 18 for [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported the conviction of leading human rights activist Rasul Jafarov by a court in Azerbaijan Thursday and called for his immediate release. HRW criticized the arrest and conviction as a government initiative to silence political critics. As the founder and chair of Human Rights Club, Jafarov had been attempting to compile [...]
US Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a temporary stay on Wednesday preventing the federal government from requiring the Roman Catholic dioceses and its affiliates in Pittsburgh and Erie, Pennsylvania to comply with the birth control mandates of the Affordable Care Act . The religious groups petitioned the US Supreme Court for a stay after [...]
A panel of three federal judges for the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia heard arguments on Thursday aiming to block proposed EPA regulations meant to slow climate change. However, the panel abstained making an affirmative action by stating it was procedurally too early to render a decision. The contested rule is [...]
Nebraska lawmakers voted 30-13 Thursday in favor of legislation that would repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment in first-degree murder cases. Nebraska currently has 11 men sitting on death row but no way of executing them because its supply of sodium thiopental expired in December 2013. Thursday’s debate included death penalty [...]
