Officials in UAE should investigate and prosecute credible accusations of torture reported by detainees, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Wednesday. According to HRW, three former detainees and the relative of a current detainee detailed instances of beatings, forced standings, and being shackled and blindfolded. The inmates were also allegedly threatened with rape, electrocution and death. [...]

Arkansas was ordered Monday to release information about the suppliers of its lethal injection drugs to attorneys of death row inmates challenging the state’s execution secrecy law. Executions were temporarily halted on Friday by Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Wendell Griffen for eight inmates that were scheduled to die between October 21 and January 14. [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit Tuesday against two psychologists who devised the torture techniques used on three former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) prisoners. The CIA contracted psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, who allegedly designed and persuaded the CIA to adopt their torture techniques as official practice of the CIA. [...]

Australia’s Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 , data retention laws requiring companies to keep records and information, went into effect on Tuesday. The law requires telecommunications providers to maintain records of acount holders, sources of communications, destinations of communications, date and time of communications, and types of communications sent. A study [...]

California pregnancy clinics on Saturday filed suit challenging a new state law that would require them to inform women and girls that come to their clinics of abortion services provided by the state. This is the first law that would require anti-abortion clinics to inform incoming individuals of abortion services. Crisis pregnancy centers are often [...]

Home Office statistics revealed Tuesday that hate crimes in England and Wales have risen by 18 percent over the last year. Police recorded 52,528 hate crimes between 2014 and 2015, which were motivated by factors including race and religious hatred, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity. The Home Office suggested that this number did not [...]

US-backed Kurdish forces and other militant groups have been committing war crimes in northern Syria in an effort to quash any sympathy or support for the Islamic State (IS) , Amnesty International (AI) reported Tuesday. According to the report, militant groups have cut off civilians’ food, life-saving services and other basic necessities. The efforts by [...]

Iran’s Parliament on Tuesday voted 161-59, with 13 abstentions, to accept the nuclear agreement that was introduced and agreed upon by world powers over the summer. Under the terms of the deal, Iran agrees to remove two-thirds of its centrifuges, ship all spent fuel from the reactor out of the country, and limit uranium research [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Katrice Bridges Copeland of Penn State Law at University Park discusses the controversy surrounding the Department of Justices’ failure to prosecute corporations and those associated with corporate fraud following the Financial Crisis of 2008… The Department of Justice (DOJ) has received a great deal of criticism for its failure to prosecute both [...]

Mexico’s attorney general on Sunday released a 54,000-page file detailing the Mexican government’s investigation into last year’s disappearance of 43 students. Attorney General Arely Gomez Gonzalez provided the partially-redacted document through Twitter following repeated calls by Mexico’s National Transparency Institute for its release. After pouring through the documents, some people are questioning the official story, [...]