A federal judge on Friday blocked Michigan’s ban on domestic partner benefits for employees who work for public schools or local governments, saying the plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on their equal protection claim by providing evidence of the state’s discriminatory purpose. Passed in 2011 by a Republican-controlled Legislature, the law ended insurance [...]

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Friday warned that recent appointments to Afghanistan’s top human rights body compromise its independence, recommending that President Hamid Karzai reconsider the appointments and re-open the selection process. Earlier this month President Karzai appointed five new commissioners to the human rights board, known as the Afghanistan [...]

The U.S. military’s highest court, the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces , overturned the murder conviction of Sgt. Lawrence Hutchins III. The Court’s decision was based on the claim that Sgt. Hutchins’s constitutional rights were violated when he was held in solitary confinement without access to a lawyer for seven days in 2006. [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Friday announced in a one-sentence order that the ban on same-sex marriages “is dissolved effective immediately”. This order comes after the Supreme Court’s decision on Wednesday that upheld the invalidation of Proposition 8 . After Friday’s court order, California Governor Jerry Brown declared that same-sex [...]

The Obama administration on Friday issued final rules requiring health insurance plans to provide women with contraceptive coverage without cost sharing. According to the rules, these final regulations seek to protect public health and guarantee women equal access to health care and are narrowly tailored so that certain organizations with religious objections do not have [...]

A court in Bangladesh on Friday sentenced nine politicians from the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) to life imprisonment for the murder of journalist Gautam Das in 2005. Shortly before his murder, Das published a series of reports detailing corruption by BNP officials. The International Press Institute (IPI) , a press freedom advocacy group, applauded [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by five residents of American Samoa who claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees them US citizenship at birth. Although American Samoans are considered US nationals, American Samoa is the only US territory where birthright citizenship is not [...]

The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) released a report Thursday which presses Iraqi leaders to develop measures addressing the growing trend of human rights abuses in Iraq. According to the UN, terrorist groups killed more than 3,100 Iraqi civilians and injured more than 12,100 during 2012. UNAMI stresses that these figures indicate a reversal [...]

The US Senate on Thursday approved a bill which would create new pathways to US citizenship for the more than 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the US. Senators voted 68-32 to pass the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act, which would allow undocumented immigrants to work and travel within the US [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Jessica Levinson of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, examines the US Supreme Court’s recent decision in Hollingsworth v. Perry…