A group of 22 Vietnamese activists were sentenced to lengthy prison terms by the local People’s Court in southern central Phu Yen province on Monday after the group was convicted of engaging in subversive activities to overthrow the county’s communist government. According to their court-appointed lawyer, the group’s 65-year-old leader Phan Van Thu was given [...]

Egypt’s Supreme Constitutional Court on Sunday postponed ruling whether the legislative constitutional assembly that just last week drafted a new charter was legitimate. The judges claimed a crowd of Islamists outside the courthouse of had intimidated the judges and blocked the entrance to the courthouse. The judges stated that they were suspending the court’s sessions [...]

Somalia’s new prime minister, Abdi Farah Shirdon Saaid, said Sunday that the Somali authorities would become more involved in protecting rape victims following intense criticism after the arrests of a woman allegedly gang-raped by soldiers and the journalist who interviewed her. The trial of an unidentified 27-year-old woman, her husband and the journalist has generated [...]

The Iranian Parliament on Sunday voted 192-56 to impeach the country’s labor minister, Abdolreza Sheikholeslami, because he appointed an official who was implicated in the deaths of anti-government prisoners in 2010. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that this constituted an abuse of power by parliament speaker Ali Larijana. Larijana is the leader of the conservative party [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Sunday urged Afghanistan to make meaningful reforms to end the use of torture in government detention centers. HRW called attention to a UN report released last month that more than half of pre-trial detainees being held in Afghanistan were being subjected to torture, saying this report “should sound alarm bells [...]

France’s National Assembly voted on Saturday to approve an article that would redefine marriage as between two people, rather than one man and one woman. The article is part of a larger bill to legalize same-sex marriage in France. The bill is one of the biggest social reforms proposed in France in decades, and more [...]

UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Adama Dieng on Friday warned of an increased risk of reprisal attacks against ethnic Tuareg and Arab civilian populations in the northern regions of Mali. When fighting broke out between government forces and Tuareg rebels in January, the president declared a state of emergency as thousands were [...]

JURIST Contributing Editor Jordan Paust of the University of Houston Law Center says that arguments put forward in the case of Bond v. United States, claiming that the federal law implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention is unconstitutional, are based on a fundamentally flawed understanding of the US Constitution…

A court in Giza, Egypt, on Saturday sentenced former interior minister Habib el-Adly to three years in prison for abusing his position by forcing public officials to work on his home and property, which the court found was an illegal use of labor. El-Adly, who worked as the head of security for former president Hosni [...]

The top court in Ontario on Friday upheld Canada’s general ban on marijuana, reversing a lower court decision which held that the nation’s marijuana laws were unconstitutional . The Court of Appeal for Ontario held that although a total ban on the use of medicinal marijuana would be unconstitutional, serious illness does not create an [...]