Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called for an end to police attacks and an investigation into the deaths of protesters in Tunisia. The protest movement in Tunisia ousted former president Zine Al Abidine Ben Ali , sending him into exile, and the UN reported this week that at least 219 have died as a result [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Jordan Paust of University of Houston Law Center says that revolutions occur in different manners around the world, including in the US, and suggests that the US and other members of the UN should change their foreign policies to reflect the values and hopes of the majority of people in an interdependent [...]

Sara Burhan Abdullah, Pitt Law LLM ’08 and JD ’11, was a judge at the Iraqi National Rounds for the Jessup International Moot Court Competition. She shares her impressions of Iraqi students and judges’ performance… I was invited to judge the Iraqi National Rounds for the Jessup International Moot Court Competition, held in December of [...]

French authorities announced Tuesday the identity of a Serbian man arrested a day earlier and suspected of participating in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, where a total of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims were killed. Milorad Momic, who has allegedly been living under a false name in France, is a suspected former member of the Serbian [...]

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay , offered technical assistance on Tuesday to Haitian authorities in the prosecution of former Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier for serious human rights violations. Pillay urged prosecutors to move forward, indicating that violations like torture, extrajudicial killings and rape are not subject to a statute of limitations [...]

Dr. Wayne Smith : “U.S.-Cuba relations changed little during 2010, and certainly showed no signs of significant improvement. On the contrary, the two sides seemed to be in something of a stalemate, with the U.S. taking the apparent position that it could not take steps to improve relations until the matter of Alan Gross was [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the District Court for Idaho dismissed a lawsuit Friday brought by environmentalists challenging Idaho’s state-created “roadless rule” to protect its forests. Judge B Lynn Winmill’s ruling upholds Idaho’s plan to manage its 9 million acres of forests across the state. The National Forest Service (NFS) issued the [...]

An Italian court on Monday convicted former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohamed Ben Riadh Nasri on terror charges and sentenced the Tunisian man to six years in prison. Prosecutors accused Nasri of working for a terror group associated with al Qaeda while living in Milan in the 1990s. The US transferred Nasri , who was arrested [...]

A judge for the Lahore High Court on Tuesday ordered that US consulate worker Raymond Davis be held for the murder of two men in Pakistan last week, ignoring US protests that Davis enjoys diplomatic immunity. Chief Justice Ijaz Ihmad Chaudhry also ordered Davis’s name to be placed on an exit control list , which [...]

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn (D) signed a bill on Monday legalizing same-sex civil unions in the state. The “Illinois Religious Freedom and Civil Union Act,” seeks to provide “adequate procedures for the certification and registration of a civil union” as well as to provide “persons entering into a civil union with the obligations, responsibilities, protections, [...]