[JURIST] The US military lawyer for Australian Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] detainee David Hicks [JURIST news archive] said Saturday that Hicks would spend years in court and could not get a fair trial before a US military commission. In remarks at a rally in Adelaide, US Marine Corps Maj. Michael Mori [Wikipedia profile] noted that the revised military commissions system [JURIST news archive] could not be used to try American citizens and questioned how such a system could then be fair enough for foreign citizens. Mori said that he believed the military tribunals were designed to deliver guilty verdicts and asserted that even if a decision on Hicks' guilt or innocence comes relatively quickly, it would likely take two or more years before an appeal from Hicks or another detainee made it to the US Supreme Court.

Hicks is one of three high profile Guantanamo prisoners facing new charges [JURIST report] announced by the US earlier this month. The original charges against Hicks, Canadian Omar Khadr and Yemeni Salim Hamdan [Trial Watch profiles] and other detainees had to be dropped after the US Supreme Court ruled the original military commissions system was unconstitutional as initially established by presidential order [JURIST report]. Hicks was picked up in Afghanistan in 2001 while allegedly fighting for the Taliban. US prosecutors claim that he trained at up to four terrorist camps. The charges against him must still be formally approved, but US Vice President Dick Cheney has said that Hicks will be among the first to be tried [transcript; ABC Australia report] after the DOD's convening authority makes a determination whether a military commission should be convened to consider the charges. AAP has more.

[JURIST] The US government has refiled charges against US Army 1st Lt. Ehren Watada [advocacy website], a US Army officer who failed to deploy to Iraq in June, after the military judge overseeing his court-martial [JURIST report] declared a mistrial two weeks ago. The judge declared a mistrial [JURIST report] after throwing out a pretrial agreement in which Watada admitted that he failed to deploy to Iraq. The jury had already seen the agreement. Under the new charges filed Friday, Watada faces four counts of conduct unbecoming an officer and one count of missing movements. If convicted, Watada could be sentenced to up to six years in prison and receive a dishonorable discharge from the Army.

Watada, a 28-year-old Honolulu native who is the first commissioned officer in the US military to publicly refuse deployment to Iraq, refuses to be classified as a conscientious objector because he does not object to war in general, just to the "illegal" war in Iraq. He offered to serve in Afghanistan, but the US Army refused. His vocal protests and participation in rallies by Veterans for Peace [advocacy website] and Courage to Resist [advocacy website] led to the charges of conduct unbecoming an officer and the original charge of contempt toward officials. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] The Washington State Human Rights Commission [official website] determined Friday that a heterosexual woman could not use the state's gay civil rights law [text, PDF; JURIST report] to secure health care benefits for her male partner because a federal law on the topic trumps the state law. Sandi Scott-Moore filed a claim in August arguing that her employer discriminated against her by not providing health care benefits for her male partner while providing benefits for the partners of gay and lesbian co-workers.

The legislation, which rewrote Washington's Civil Rights Act to include the phrase "sexual orientation" among the classes of people protected from housing discrimination, lending, and employment, was signed [JURIST report] by Governor Christine Gregoire last January, making Washington the seventeenth state in the nation with an anti-discrimination law that covers sexual orientation. Scott-Moore's case was one of the first to test the new law, but the Human Rights Commission determined that it did not have jurisdiction because the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act [text] governs health care plans and supersedes the state statute. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more.

[JURIST] The Democratic-controlled Montana Senate [official website] voted 27-21 Friday to give second-reading approval to a bill [text, PDF; procedural history] that would eliminate the death penalty [JURIST news archive] in Montana. Third reading is slated for February 24 before the measure goes to the Republican-controlled state House of Representatives [official website].

Eleven US states have recently suspended the death penalty pending review of the manner in which the death penalty is administered. In early-February, Tennessee governor suspended executions [JURIST report] pending procedural review. In January a North Carolina state judge issued an injunction [JURIST report] blocking executions there until Governor Mike Easley issues new procedures to execute capital defendants without the presence of doctors. Capital punishment has also been suspended in Florida, California, and New Jersey [JURIST reports], Arkansas, Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, and South Dakota. AP has more.

[JURIST] US District Judge Mark Wolf dismissed [opinion, PDF] a lawsuit [complaint] Friday against a Massachusetts town that allows its public school system to teach children about same-sex marriage [JURIST news archive]. Two families of elementary school students filed the suit last year to stop the school from reading homosexual-themed books to their children without first notifying parents, arguing that the school's actions violated their right to free exercise of religion.

Students in a Lexington elementary school read the book King & King [Wikipedia backgrounder], which tells a story about a prince who rejects many princesses before marrying another prince. In his ruling, Wolf said "diversity is a hallmark of our nation. It is increasingly evident that our diversity includes differences in sexual orientation." Currently, Massachusetts is the only state to allow full same-sex marriage, which was legalized when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts [official website] ruled [JURIST report] in 2003 that a ban on such marriages was unconstitutional. An appeal of Wolf's ruling is planned. Reuters has more. The Boston Globe has local coverage.

[JURIST] The United States Friday rejected an international call [JURIST report] to ban the use of cluster munitions [FAS backgrounder] by 2008. State Department [official website] spokesperson Sean McCormack [official profile] told reporters at a daily press briefing [text; video] that the United States "takes the position that [cluster] munitions do have a place and a use in military inventories, given the right technology as well as the proper rules of engagement." McCormack emphasized that the United States has spent "about a billion dollars" in the past decade to clean up "unexploded munitions all around the world." Meanwhile Friday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon [official website; JURIST news archive] encouraged [press release] "all progress to reduce and ultimately eliminate the horrendous humanitarian effects of these weapons." Ban also called on the parties to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) [UN backgrounder; US delegation backgrounder] to reexamine the "reliability... technical and design characteristics of cluster munitions with a view to minimizing their humanitarian impact."

Earlier Friday, 46 of 49 countries participating in the two-day Oslo Conference on Cluster Munitions [conference materials] agreed to an action plan to develop a new international treaty [press release] to ban the use of cluster munitions by 2008. Romania, Poland and Japan refused to sign the Oslo Declaration [text, PDF]. The United States, Russia, Israel, and China chose not to attend the conference. Cluster munitions are considered by many to be inaccurate weapons designed to spread damage indiscriminately and could therefore be considered illegal [CMC backgrounder] under multiple provisions of Protocol I [text] of the Geneva Conventions (1977). AFP has more. UN News Centre has additional coverage.

[JURIST] Judge William R. Wilson Jr. of the US District Court of Eastern Arkansas [official website] ruled [order, PDF] Friday that the Little Rock School District [official website] was "substantially complying" with its Revised Desegregation and Education Plan ("Revised Plan") and released the school district from court supervision [LRSD press release and timeline]. The Little Rock School District voluntarily entered into the Revised Plan in 1998 "as a way of settling...over forty years of more or less continuous desegregation litigation." The Revised Plan required the school district to "substantially comply with hundreds of desegregation obligations in order to achieve unitary status."

In September 13, 2003, Wilson issued a memorandum opinion finding that Little Rock had substantially complied with all of its obligations in the Revised Plan with the exception of one that requires the school district to annually assess and improve the effectiveness of academic programs in improving African-American achievement. The school district unsuccessfully applied for unitary status in March 12, 2004. The Little Rock School District was the location of infamous 1957 confrontation between Arkansas governor Orval Faubus [Wikipedia profile] and the federal government following the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka [opinion, HTML], which outlawed racial segregation in public education. AP has more.

[JURIST] An independent report [text, PDF] by UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories John Dugard [Wikipedia profile; JURIST news archive] to be presented to the 4th session of the UN Human Rights Council [official website; JURIST news archive] in Geneva next month criticizes Israel's continued military occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), and characterizes "elements of the occupation [as] constituting forms of colonialism and... apartheid." The report, which also condemns human rights violations by Palestinian militants, such as the "firing of shells and rockets into civilian areas without any apparent military advantage," nevertheless reserves its strongest condemnation for Israel [JURIST news archive] due to its state status and the systematic violations perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) [official website]. Alleged Israeli violations of human rights include the restriction on Palestinian freedom of movement by the Israeli West Bank barrier [official website; JURIST news archive], and walls in East Jerusalem and South Hebron, as well as the targeted assassinations of Palestinians [JURIST report] which the report describes as the "back door" imposition of the death penalty.

Dugard was appointed in 2001 as an independent expert by the now-defunct UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) to investigate Israeli violations of human rights. Israel and the United States have dismissed his reports as one-sided. AP has more.