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 [...]

Pakistani police on Tuesday filed charges against former president Pervez Musharraf alleging that he illegally detained members of the judiciary after declaring emergency rule in November 2007. Sixty judges, including Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry , were forced to remain in their homes after refusing to swear an oath to uphold the Provisional [...]

Lawyers for Myanmar opposition pro-democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi and American John Yettaw said Wednesday that they will file appeals against Tuesday's guilty verdicts . Suu Kyi and Yettaw were convicted of violating state security laws after Suu Kyi, who was under house arrest, allowed Yettaw to stay in her home after he swam [...]

Chechen human rights activist Zarema Sadulayeva and her husband Alik Dzhabrailov were found dead in the trunk of their car Tuesday, after being abducted Monday. Saulayeva and Dzhabrailov were taken from the office of her organization, Let's Save the Generation, which works to aid children affected by violence in Chechnya. The pair were reportedly removed [...]

Christina Hill : "It has been reported that local communities in the Indonesian province of West Papua have filed a $30 billion lawsuit against the local subsidiary of US mining company Freeport-McRoRan Copper & Gold – operator of the giant Grasberg mine. The company is being sued for environmental and human rights violations. As reported [...]