A court in Saudi Arabia on Monday sentenced three lawyers to between five and eight years in prison for criticizing the justice system on the social networking website Twitter by accusing authorities of carrying out arbitrary detentions. The Saudi Press Agency reported that the lawyers were each convicted of different crimes, including using the social [...]
The 18th Central Committee within the Communist Party of China (CPC) on Tuesday released guidelines on how to improve China’s legal system in the upcoming year. The summary, released last week , also stressed that government authorities at all levels should carry out their work on track with the law while adhering to the leadership [...]
Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged Iran Tuesday to stop detaining and harassing human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh . HRW also urged Iranian officials to end interference in the internal affairs of Iran’s bar association. HRW stressed that the government and the bar association need to ensure that no lawyer is disciplined for defending clients, and [...]
A Bahrain court on Tuesday ordered the country’s main Shiite opposition group, Al-Wefaq to suspend all activities. Bahrain’s Ministry of Justice filed the lawsuit in July. The ruling means that Al-Wefaq cannot operate for three months in the Gulf island kingdom. The group cannot organize rallies or press conferences, issue statements or use its offices. [...]
Attorneys for a convicted Missouri man and 15 former judges on Monday asked the US Supreme Court to block his execution , claiming that mistakes were made by his former attorneys, which led him to lose his opportunity to appeal his case to the federal courts. Mark Christeson, 35, is scheduled to be executed at [...]
A UN human rights expert said Monday that he was “shocked” by Iran’s execution of a woman convicted of murdering a man whom she accused of raping her. Reyhaneh Jabbari was executed in Tehran’s Evin prison on Saturday morning despite international opposition from many organizations and rights groups, including UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Richard Kelsey, of George Mason University School of Law, discusses the Supreme Court’s recent actions on same-sex marriage … The Constitution provides no citizen of any gender or orientation a Constitutional right to marriage. The Constitution is silent on the issue of marriage. It is not mentioned, and therefore it is not [...]
Militant group Boko Haram has forced kidnapped women and girls to marry their captors and begun using them for military tactical purposes, Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported Monday. HRW interviewed 30 individuals who were abducted by the group between April 2013 and April 2014 and 16 others who saw the abductions. According to the advocacy [...]
Amnesty International (AI) on Monday urged Malaysian authorities to end their politically motivated criminalization of government critics. The country’s Sedition Act of 1948 , a law that limits freedom of speech and expression, has been used increasingly by the Malaysian government to persecute activists and opposition leaders. This year two people have been convicted of [...]
China is contemplating eliminating the death penalty as punishment for nine crimes, according to a report released Monday by Chinese state media outlet Xinhua. The proposed legislation was submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) for a first reading Monday. According to the report, the nine crimes include: “smuggling weapons, ammunition, [...]
