A Buddhist monk was sentenced to seven years imprisonment in Myanmar during a visit by UN High Representative for Human Rights Tomas Ojea Quintana , an opposition lawyer confirmed Saturday. Gaw Thita was convicted Wednesday by a special court in Insein Prison for violating immigration laws in relation to a trip he took to Taiwan, [...]

Saudi Justice Minister Mohammed al-Eissa announced Saturday that women will be allowed to argue cases in court under a new law that his department is drafting. The law is expected to be issued in the near future and would allow female lawyers to represent other women in cases related to family law, such as child [...]

Oklahoma state court judge Daniel Owens ruled Friday that a state law , making it illegal for a doctor to perform an abortion based on the gender of a fetus and requiring numerous reporting requirements, violates the Oklahoma Constitution . Owens found that the law, called the Statistical Reporting of Abortions Act, violated the constitutional [...]

Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko on Saturday withdrew her lawsuit filed in the Supreme Administrative Court of Ukraine claiming that the country's presidential election was corrupt. Tymoshenko dropped the suit claiming she would not receive a fair hearing in the court. She had alleged that widespread voter fraud allowed her opponent, Viktor Yanukovych , to [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Benjamin Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law says that the guilt or innocence of "enhanced interrogation" memo writers John Yoo and Jay Bybee should be determined in state or federal court by a jury of their peers, rather than under the forgiving gaze of the Office of Professional Responsibility…. [...]

Min Myat Kyaw : "The sentencing of four supporters of democracy party leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to two years' imprisonment last week is the latest instance of how courts in Burma (Myanmar) operate under the military regime there to defeat civil and political rights, without regard to the terms of the very laws [...]

The UK Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on Saturday called for an independent investigation into allegations that the government had knowledge of and was complicit in the torture of Binyam Mohamed and 24 other British residents and citizens while they were held abroad as terror suspects. The EHRC's statement cites a letter from the [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has overruled the findings of a report released Friday concluding that two Bush administration lawyers committed professional misconduct when they wrote memos authorizing the use of certain interrogation techniques that critics have called torture. Instead, the DOJ said that John Yoo , and Jay Bybee were only guilty of [...]

International Criminal Court (ICC) deputy prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said Friday that Guinean authorities likely committed crimes against humanity when more than 150 pro-democracy protesters killed in Conarky in September 2009. At the conclusion of her three day visit , Bensouda, a Gambian lawyer, said that the ICC would work with the Guinean legal system to [...]

The Council of Europe (COE) reached a joint declaration Friday to undertake reforms of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) by the end of 2011 in order to address the increasing number of complaints. The ECHR currently has a backlog of approximately 120,000 cases, of which an estimated 90 percent are inadmissible or lack [...]