As Justice Sonia Sotomayor takes a seat on the US Supreme Court – the first Hispanic and only the third woman to do so – the federal judiciary as a whole continues to be heavily dominated by white males, according to a new report released by the Brookings Institution . As of early August 2009, [...]

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) acknowledged Monday that 11 deaths in immigration detention had gone unreported . ICE added 10 names to the official roster of immigration detainee fatalities and acknowledged an eleventh death that occurred last week. The revelation of the additional deaths came in response to an American Civil Liberties Union [...]

The specially-established Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission on Monday awarded damages "resulting from violations of international law" that occurred during the nations' 1998-2000 border war. The five-person panel established under the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague awarded USD $174,036,520 to Ethiopia and $161,455,000 to Eritrea , not including an additional $2,065,865 granted to individual Eritrean [...]

The US Department of State (DOS) on Monday announced that it has sent a report to Congress that gives a favorable opinion of Mexico's recent human rights record, paving the way for US aid to the country. The report outlines Mexico's progress in addressing a variety of human rights issues as part of the Merida [...]

Former Credit Suisse broker Eric Butler was convicted Monday of multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York . His co-defendant Julian Tzolov pleaded guilty last month and testified against Butler. Butler and Tzolov are accused of defrauding clients out of more than $400 million [...]

The Scottish High Court of the Judiciary on Tuesday accepted a request from convicted Pan Am Flight 103 bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi to withdraw a pending appeal to his 2001 conviction. The court's decision to drop the appeal removes an impediment to Megrahi's petition to serve the remainder of his sentence in his [...]

A judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued a confidential ruling last week denying a habeas corpus petition by Guantanamo Bay detainee Adham Mohammed Ali Awad, the Miami Herald reported Monday. Yemeni native Ali Awad was detained following a skirmish and standoff outside a hospital in Afghanistan in 2002 and [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to stay the execution of death row inmate Jason Getsy. The Court also declined Getsy's petition for review. This was the first decision for newly sworn in Justice Sonia Sotomayor , who would have stayed the execution, along with Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruther Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen [...]

A Swiss court has denied an appeal by the family of former Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier to claim money hidden in Swiss banks by Duvalier while he led the island nation. The family's claim was rejected by the Federal Criminal Court of Switzerland , because the family could not prove that the money had come [...]

Niger's opposition parties on Monday announced that they would resist any effort to implement a new constitution expanding executive powers, which was approved by Nigerien voters earlier this month and validated by the country's Constitutional Court on Friday. Human rights activist Abdul Kamardine said that "civil societies are joining hands with the political opposition" to [...]