The first trial judging charges of genocide against Cambodia’s 1970s Khmer Rouge regime opened on Friday with the prosecutor saying it will show that Cambodians were enslaved in inhumane conditions that led to the deaths of 1.7 million people from starvation, disease and execution. Khieu Samphan, the regime’s head of state and Nuon Chea, the [...]

Pakistan’s Lahore High Court on Thursday upheld the death sentence for Aasiya Noreen (better known as Asia Bibi), who was convicted of blasphemy in 2010. Bibi, a Christian woman, was alleged to have insulted the Prophet Mohammed while working in a field with several Muslim women. Bibi maintains that she never blasphemed against the Prophet, [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has filed a motion in the US District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to stay an order issued by the court earlier this month requiring the public release of 28 videos showing the forcible removal and forced feeding of Guantanamo Bay detainee Wa’el Dhiab. Dhiab, a Syrian [...]

The United States Commission on Civil Rights invited Professor David A. Harris of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law to testify at the Commission’s hearing on October 17, 2014. The subject of the hearing is Stand Your Ground laws. The state of Florida passed the first such law in 2005, and many states have [...]

Shiite muslim cleric Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was convicted Wednesday of sedition and other charges in Saudi Arabia’s Specialized Criminal Court and sentenced to death, raising fears of unrest from his supporters in neighboring Bahrain. Al-Nimr has been a vocal critic of the majority Sunni government in Saudi Arabia and was a key leader in the [...]

More than 100 Colombian farmers on Wednesday filed a lawsuit with the UK high court against British company Equion Energia , previously known as BP Exploration Colombia (BPXC), for alleged negligence when it built the Ocensa oil pipeline. The farmers are seeking around USD $29 million in compensation for environmental damage caused by the pipeline, [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Amaury Reyes-Torres of Iberoamerican University (UNIBE) in Mexico, discusses Baskin v. Bogan and argues that the opinion presents an alternative approach to the equal protection standard of review for discriminatory acts… The right to equality or the right to equal protection of the laws is essential in a democratic society. This right [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Wednesday that an Arizona law that acted to deny bail to individuals in the US illegally and charged with a range of felonies was unconstitutional. Proposition 100 , passed in 2006, prohibited bail for individuals charged with both “committing a serious felony offense, and who [...]

The Arkansas Supreme Court struck down the state’s voter identification law on Wednesday, finding it unconstitutional. Act 592 required “proof of identity in the form of a voter-identification card or a document or identification card showing the voter’s name and photo issued by the United States, the State of Arkansas, or an accredited postsecondary educational [...]

Rights experts from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights announced the findings of a report on Wednesday alleging a number of summary executions and forced executions carried out against civilians by Congolese national forces during operation ‘Likofi’ between November 2013 and February 2014. The UN Joint Human Rights Office in the [...]