Homicide rates in Central American countries, including El Salvador and Honduras, are reaching a “crisis point,” according to a Thursday UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report detailing global rates of homicide. The report found that young men in Central and Southern America, Central and Southern Africa and the Caribbean are at the greatest [...]

The new chief prosecutor, Army Brig. General Mark Martins , on Wednesday indicated future military commissions at Guantanamo will be more transparent and fair to defendants. In addition to congressionally mandated changes like restrictions on the use of evidence obtained through torture or coercion, Martins highlighted a new website where more court documents will be [...]

The Sri Lankan Special Envoy of the President on Human Rights, Mahinda Samarasinghe, announced on Thursday the Cabinet of Ministers has adopted the National Action Plan for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights. The five-year plan fulfills Sri Lanka’s pledge made in 2008 as part of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) . According to [...]

Defense counsel for three Kenyan leaders charged in the International Criminal Court (ICC) with inciting violence after the December 2007 Kenyan elections argued Wednesday that prosecutors had not fully investigated evidence that they planned to present at trial. Defense counsel argued that witnesses for the prosecution were motivated by greed and that the charges against [...]

The EU Court of Justice (ECJ) advocate general Juliane Kokott on Thursday issued an opinion stating that an EU law forcing foreign airlines using EU airports to pay fees for greenhouse gas emissions is lawful . Kokott said that the carbon emission fees do not violate international law, as several US and Canadian airlines have [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch says that Obama has corrected course from the worst of the Bush-era detainee abuses but the US should implement public procedural safeguards to ensure detainees are not transferred to countries where they face a risk of torture… A cache of documents recently uncovered by Human [...]

Pakistani Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry on Thursday issued a judgment urging political parties to stop financing criminal groups responsible for increased violence in the city of Karachi. In the judicial decision, Chaudhry announced that militant groups have gained strength because of support from local political groups and ordered the Pakistani government to [...]

Bahrain on Wednesday announced retrials will be given to 20 medical staff convicted last month of participating in the country’s pro-democracy protests against the ruling regime. Dr. Ali al-Boainain, Bahrain’s attorney general, stated that the department of public prosecution had studied the judgment rendered against the 20 Shiite medics by the National Safety Court of [...]

Derrick Bell, a leading legal scholar and the first tenured African-American professor at Harvard Law School , died Wednesday in New York of carcinoid cancer. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bell graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1957, the only African-American in his class. He subsequently worked for the US [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama on Wednesday denied an emergency motion to issue a temporary injunction on those portions of Alabama’s recently passed immigration law that the same judge last week ruled did not meet the requirements for a preliminary injunction. The plaintiffs in the case this [...]