Here’s the international legal news we covered this week:
Peru’s
Congress [official website, in spanish]
voted [
La República report, in Spanish] by a wide margin on Thursday to begin impeachment proceedings against
President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski [BBC profile] for a second time in three months.
Congress voted 87-15 in favor of admitting the impeachment motion with 15 abstentions.
The US Treasury Department imposed new
economic sanctions [press release] Thursday on 19 Russian individuals and five entities for their interference in the 2016 US election, and a number of other destructive cyber-attacks.
Turkey’s parliament on Tuesday
approved legislation [materials, in Turkish] modifying electoral regulations, leading to a brawl on the chamber floor as the opposition says the new rules could lead to fraud and undermine the integrity of a slate of polls scheduled next year.
South Africa’s former president Jacob Zuma is facing trial over 16 charges related to corruption, South Africa’s
National Prosecuting Authority [official website] boss Shaun Abrahams
announced on Friday.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a
report [executive summary, PDF] on Thursday detailing human rights violations that occurred during the early parts of the investigation into the
kidnapping of 43 students from Ayotzinapa [BBC backgrounder] in Mexico.
The OHCHR’s report covers human rights violations from September 2014 to January 2016 committed by the Mexican government during the investigation.
The Kyoto District Court ruled Thursday that the
Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) [official website], which operated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, was liable to voluntary evacuees in the sum of USD $1 million for failing to take adequate measures to protect the plant from the tsunami.
Presiding Judge Nobuyoshi Asami noted [Asahi report] a 2002 government “long-term assessment,” which outlined the possibility of a powerful earthquake and tsunami striking the plant.
[JURIST] The
UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria [official website] released a
report [text, PDF] on Thursday condemning the pervasive sexual and gender-based violence that has occurred over the past six and a half years in the Syrian conflict.
The report, entitled “I lost my dignity: Sexual and gender-based violence in the Syrian Arab Republic,” was written after UN workers interviewed more than 450 Syrian survivors, lawyers, healthcare practitioners and other affected individuals concerning the use of such violence between March 2011 and December 2017.
The
Supreme Court of India [official website]
ruled [judgment, PDF] Tuesday that foreign lawyers cannot practice law within the country.
Parties included both law firms and individual lawyers from the UK, US, France and Australia.
China’s
National People’s Congress [official website] on Sunday added supervisory commissions and announced that it will reform China’s criminal code, both measures aimed at furthering in the government’s anti-graft campaign.
The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) released a
report [text, PDF] Monday detailing human rights violations in the aftermath of the 2017
Honduran presidential election [Reuters backgrounder]
The report documents violence committed by the government security forces towards protestors and civilians in the time period between election night on November 26 and inauguration day on January 27.
A UN official investigating human rights in Myanmar,
Yanghee Lee [official profile], on Monday
called [press release] for an immediate investigation into “clearance operations” in Rakhine State, stating she is increasingly convinced the state’s actions amount to genocide.
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