The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously ruled Tuesday to uphold the affirmative action policy of considering race in student admissions at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) . The plaintiffs, two Caucasian students, were denied undergraduate admission to UT in 2008, and subsequently challenged UT’s admissions policy, which allows the [...]

The US Supreme Court on Wednesday unanimously overturned a lower court’s ruling in NASA v. Nelson and upheld the background checks that NASA uses for employees of companies working under contract. In 2008 the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the government violates a federal contract employee’s constitutional right to informational privacy [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Wednesday in FCC v. AT&T on whether exemption 7(C) of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) applies to corporations. Under exemption 7(C), an agency can withhold information pursuant to an FOIA request if that information can reasonably be believed to be a violation of the individual’s privacy. The [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday appealed a ruling that found the minimum coverage provision of the recently enacted health care reform law unconstitutional. The government filed a notice of appeal in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia , signaling its intent to challenge Judge Henry Hudson’s December finding [...]

The human rights group Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released a report Wednesday detailing human rights abuses in Myanmar. The report revealed eight violations that fall under the purview of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and may be classified as crimes against humanity. The report presented the first quantitative data of human rights violations in [...]

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Monday commenced the trial of Idelphonse Nizeyimana on charges related to his role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide . Nizeyimana, nicknamed “Butcher of Butare” , faces four counts of genocide, complicity in genocide, and crimes against humanity including rape and other inhumane acts. Specifically, Nizeyimana, while in [...]

A judge for the Jerusalem District Court on Wednesday ordered suspected Bosnian war criminal Aleksander Cvetkovic held in jail while the Israeli government attempts to extradite him to Bosnia to stand trial for crimes committed during the 1992-1995 Bosnian Civil War . The Israeli State Attorney’s Office filed a petition with the court following Cvetkovic’s [...]

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that the US government does not have to release non-redacted transcripts relating to the interrogation of certain “high value” detainees at Guantanamo Bay . The court held that the Department of Defense (DOD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [...]

Former Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier from exile in France on Sunday, stating that he had come to offer assistance to help the country recover from last year’s earthquake . On Monday, Amnesty International (AI) called for Haitian authorities to prosecute Duvalier for human rights violations committed during his time in office. AI claimed Duvalier and [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in the consolidated cases of General Dynamics Corp. v. United States and The Boeing Company v. United States on the ability of the government, under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause , to keep a claim against a party after invoking the state secrets privilege and preventing [...]