The Mexican Supreme Court of Justice on Wednesday ordered the release of 20 men and the retrial of 6 others convicted in connection with the 1997 massacre in Acteal, Chiapas of 45 rebel sympathizers at a Catholic prayer meeting. The court found that the 2002-2007 convictions on charges of assault, aggravated homicide, and carrying military [...]

David Satter : "The proposed law allowing Russian troops to intervene beyond Russia's borders is meant merely to provide legal cover for possible future Russian aggression. The law, which presumably will be adopted, declares as "legal" what was already done in the case of the Russian invasion of Georgia last August. The principal point of [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas on Wednesday held that Microsoft has infringed on a patent of Canadian company i4i with portions of its Word 2007 and 2003 word-processing software. Judge Leonard Davis enjoined the company from selling the infringing programs and upheld a jury award against the [...]

Right-wing nativist and so-called "patriot" anti-government militias are again on the rise in the US, according to a Wednesday report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) . The SPLC said that such groups, which had declined severely since the 1990s, are generally anti-tax, anti-immigration, and increasingly racially motivated since the election of the country's [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist James Friedman of the University of Maine School of Law says that despite the potential political cost to President Obama of investigating the torture memos released by the former Bush administration, failure to act on the memos may take an even more costly toll on our identity and well-being as a nation…. [...]

The US District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday enjoined the technology company RealNetworks from selling its DVD copying software, RealDVD. Judge Marilyn Patel held that the RealDVD software violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and rejected RealNetwork's fair use defense. Patel did not not entirely dismiss the notion that a [...]

A federal court in Atlanta on Wednesday found American Ehsanul Islam Sadequee guilty on four terrorism-related counts. Sadequee was convicted in the US District Court for the Northern District of Georgia of providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization by making himself available to participate in violent jihad and by shooting "casing" videos of [...]

The mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, on Tuesday pardoned 2,500 people arrested in the city during nonviolent civil rights protests in the 1960s. Announcing the pardons at a city council meeting, Mayor Larry Langford said that the city had an obligation to ask for forgiveness because it had "wronged so many." Langford acknowledged that many eligible [...]

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Jakob Kellenberger on Wednesday called for greater compliance with the Geneva Conventions , making the documents' 60th anniversary . Kellenberger said that the conventions were tested in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, with the global "war on terror" posing a "huge challenge": The traumatic events [...]

The Supreme Court of Argentina ruled Tuesday that individuals cannot be required to submit blood samples to test whether they were abducted as children during the "Dirty War" . The court issued two rulings in the cases of brothers Guillermo Gabriel Prieto and Emiliano Matias Prieto , finding that genetic material can be collected from [...]