The members of Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) collectively resigned on Tuesday. The Board of Commissioners’ resignations were meant to protest political interference based on conflicting parliamentary and judicial decisions excluding certain candidates from Iraq’s upcoming election. Iraq’s parliament and judiciary have provided conflicting interpretations of Clause 3 of Article 8 of Iraq’s Electoral [...]

Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the son-in-law of Osama bin Laden , was found guilty on Wednesday of both conspiring to kill Americans and providing terrorists with material support, following a jury trial in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York . Abu Ghaith, who was convicted for his role as spokesman for [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Avigail Goldglancz, St. John’s University School of Law, Class of 2014, is the author of the eighth article in a 10-part series from the staffers of the Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development. Goldglancz discusses the current institutional barriers facing women attempting to receive the free contraception granted to them in [...]

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced on Wednesday that three air force generals were arrested and brought before a military tribunal for plotting a coup. In his remarks on Venezuela’s state run broadcast, Maduro stated that the three generals, who he did not name, were “trying to turn the air force against the legitimately constituted government.” [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday on whether companies have a right to an exemption from the contraception provision of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) for religious reasons. The plaintiffs in the combined cases of Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Inc and Conestoga Wood v. Sebelius contend they should be [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Alex Abdo of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) explains the constitutional issues surrounding dragnet surveillance and why the ACLU and others are correct in challenging the broad surveillance…

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Tuesday expressed acute concern after an Egyptian court on Monday sentenced 529 supporters of deposed president Mohammed Morsi to death for inciting violence and protest. The OHCHR reportedly takes issue with the court’s failure to offer more than perfunctory procedural protections, in violation [...]

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled in US v. Castleman that a federal law banning gun possession after a state domestic abuse conviction involving “physical force” can be satisfied by the degree of force supporting a common law battery conviction, namely, “offensive touching.” In 2001, James Alvin Castleman pleaded guilty to a Tennessee misdemeanor [...]

An administrative court in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, issued a temporary injunction Wednesday ordering the country’s telecommunication authority (TIB) to lift its ban on the use of the social media website Twitter . The ban on Twitter was imposed last week under orders from Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the grounds that the [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Tuesday granted an extension of a temporary hold on a Detroit federal judge’s ruling in DeBoer v. Michigan that struck down Michigan’s same-sex marriage ban. The court granted the stay in light of the US Supreme Court’s issuance of a stay in a similar case, [...]