The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 11-10 Friday to advance Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh for a full vote on the Senate floor. The vote was along party lines, with the 11 committee Republicans voting in favor of Kavanaugh’s advancement and the 10 committee Democrats voting against his advancement. However, Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) said that he would only vote [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Thursday found a Washington county violated the First Amendment when it refused to run an anti-terrorism advertisement on the side of a bus. The American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) sued King County Metro for refusing to run an ad featuring photographs of people exclusively of [...]
The UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution Friday that calls for an independent mechanism to collect evidence of the serious international crimes committed in Myanmar. The resolution reflects a council decision to “establish an ongoing independent mechanism to collect, consolidate, preserve and analyze evidence of the most serious international crimes and violations of international [...]
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday adopted a resolution calling on Venezuela to accept humanitarian assistance and requesting a comprehensive report on the country’s human rights situation. The Council called on the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to accept assistance “in order to address the scarcity of food, medicine and medical [...]
Judge Theodor Meron of the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals withdrew Thursday from appellate proceedings in the case of former Serbian president Radovan Karadzic. The decision came two days after lawyers for Karadzic filed a motion seeking Judge Meron’s recusal based on what they argued was an appearance of bias. In the motion filed [...]
The Supreme Court of India on Thursday struck down Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code, ending the 158-year-old colonial statute that made adultery illegal. The section allowed for the wife of an adulterer to be charged as an abettor and receive the same punishment, and did not allow for a wife to seek charges [...]
The Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and US Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh regarding the sexual assault allegations made by Blasey Ford earlier this month. In her opening statement , Blasey Ford said: My motivation in coming forward was to provide the facts about how Mr. Kavanaugh’s actions have [...]
Ed Royce (R-CA) , Chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, called upon the Trump administration Wednesday to “go further” in its reaction to the Myanmar Rohingya conflict and to condemn crimes against the Rohingya people which “amount to genocide.” Last week UN investigators renewed their call for charges to be [...]
The US Supreme Court granted certiorari in five cases Thursday. The first of these cases is Thacker v. Tennessee Valley Authority , which “tests the immunity of governmental ‘sue and be sued’ entities” and questions whether the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit used the correct rule in order to protect the Tennessee [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday upheld a Louisiana abortion law “requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a hospital located within thirty miles of the clinic where they perform abortions.” The court contrasted the Louisiana law, Unsafe Abortion Protection Act , with the US Supreme Court’s 2016 decision in Whole [...]
