A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi Tuesday remanded to state court the Mississippi attorney general’s lawsuit against the administrator of the British Petroleum (BP) $20 billion Deepwater Horizon oil spill reparations fund, the Gulf Coast Claims Facility (GCCF) . Seeking to enforce an earlier subpoena for access to [...]

The UN-backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) on Thursday decided that Ieng Thirith is unfit to stand trial—just days before the war crimes trial of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders is set to start. Ieng, the former minister of social affairs and the only female leader to be charged, had been charged [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Ed Goldman of the University of Michigan says that fetal personhood laws, which would declare a fetus to be a person from the time of conception, would have a wide range of consequences for women’s medical care, stem cell research, and the availability of contraception… In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court [...]

The Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday finally agreed on a controversial detainee provision of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2012 that governs the handling and prosecuting of suspected al Qaeda detainees. The provision, which was approved by a 26-0 vote , allows the military to have complete custody and control over terror suspects [...]

The Massachusetts legislature passed a bill Tuesday night that will protect transgender people in housing, credit and the workplace, as well as including them under hate crime protections. The bill passed the House by a vote of 115-37 and the Senate by a vote of 95-56 and was sent to be signed by Governor Deval [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and EG Justice claimed Tuesday that Equatorial Guinea’s recent referendum on constitutional reforms was rife with voter fraud . The referendum , which was approved with near-unanimous support, removed the age limit for presidents and created a vice president position, apparently allowing current President Teodoro Obiang Nguema to name his son [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Monday filed a brief in its appeal to the Montana Supreme Court arguing that denying partnership benefits to same-sex couples violates the Montana state constitution . The ACLU opined that a district judge’s April dismissal of a lawsuit by six same-sex couples in Donaldson and Guggenheim v. State [...]

A panel of judges from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Wednesday ordered the appointment of a medical expert to conduct a medical examination and issue a report on the physical condition of former Serbian general and alleged war criminal Ratko Mladic . The order was issued in response to Mladic’s [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday called on Egypt’s military prosecutors to release Alaa Abd El Fattah , a blogger and activist who engaged in protests and accused the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF) of committing abuses, such as using military trials for civilians. He was charged with incitement and theft of a military [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday filed a brief in the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit urging the court to strike down Alabama’s immigration law . The DOJ filed its brief in response to a federal judge’s September 28 ruling that allowed the state to enforce a provision that makes [...]