The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) transferred several high-profile prisoners to Guantanamo Bay to await trial in 2003, only to transfer them back into the CIA’s network of secret prisons so they would not be entitled to lawyers and access to US courts, the Associated Press reported Friday. Among the suspects reportedly on the September 2003 [...]

Emma Founds, Pitt Law ’11, traveled to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) through Pitt’s Center for International Legal Education and reports on the ICTR’s difficulty in prosecuting gender-based crimes, such as rape and sexual assault… While there have been major advancements in the prosecution of gender crimes internationally, the ICTR has been lax [...]

The US Senate on Thursday failed to authorize a settlement between the US government and minority farmers for alleged discrimination. The $4.6 billion settlement would be distributed between several hundred thousand minority farmers. Among that group are Native American farmers claiming that the US Department of the Interior (DOI) failed to pay them royalties on [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Charles Jalloh of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law says that unless the AU and the ICC establish a proper dialogue, the logic of mutual gain for the ICC and Africa is at a risk of being undermined if not entirely lost…. On July 27, 2010, the Assembly of Heads of [...]

The Supreme Court of Mexico on Thursday ruled 8-2 that a Mexico City law allowing same-sex marriage is constitutional. The law, passed last year , was challenged by Mexican Attorney General Arturo Chavez , who had argued that allowing same-sex marriages violates the guarantee of familial integrity under the Mexican Constitution . It was also [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Thursday announced that 14 individuals have been charged with providing money, personnel and services to the Somalia-based Islamic terrorism organization al-Shabaab . Prosecutors in the Southern District of Alabama, the Southern District of California and the District of Minnesota unsealed four separate indictments accusing the 14 individuals of [...]

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons Thursday in a speech delivered during a visit to the Japanese city of Nagasaki. In his speech, Ban emphasized the importance of eliminating existing nuclear weapons and using political pressure to create stronger nonproliferation treaties: In the General Assembly and at the review [...]

The US Senate on Thursday voted 63-37 to confirm Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court . The vote fell largely along party lines, with only one Democrat voting against her confirmation, and five Republicans voting in favor. Shortly before the vote, Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) announced that he could not support Kagan’s confirmation [...]

Federal authorities arrested a Chicago man Tuesday night on suspicion that he planned to travel to Somalia and train with terrorist groups there in order to become a suicide bomber. Acording to a complaint filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois , Shaker Masri, an American citizen born in [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the District of Maryland has denied a motion to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a group of former Iraqi detainees against US military contractors. The lawsuit, Al-Quraishi v. Nakhla , filed in June 2008 , alleges that L-3 Services, Inc. violated US and international law by directing [...]