JURIST Guest Columnist Dr. Laurent Pech, Jean Monnet Lecturer in European Union Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, says that the experience of France – and some principled reflections – should make the US House of Representatives think twice before adopting any resolution labelling the early twentieth-century killings of Armenians in the Ottoman [...]

Neil Hicks : "The brief detention of five foreign human rights activists who were attending a planned international meeting commemorating the work of Anna Politkovskaya in the provincial city of Nizhny Novgorod on October 6, 2007 should be seen as an escalation in official harassment and interference in the work of the independent human rights [...]

US District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction Wednesday blocking the implementation of new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regulations intended to make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to obtain US employment. The ruling follows Breyer's extension of a temporary restraining order blocking the implementation [...]

US military forces in Iraq released 60 detainees Wednesday as part of Operation Lion's Paw , an ongoing effort to increase the number of Iraqi detainees released daily to at least 50 during the month of Ramadan, which ends Saturday. Organized by the Iraqi government and the Multi-National Force – Iraq (MNF-I) , the program [...]

The US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee Wednesday approved a resolution labeling the World War I-era killings of over one million Armenians by Turkish soldiers as genocide. The resolution now goes to the House floor, where a vote is expected in mid-November. US President George W. Bush expressed disappointment over the committee decision, worrying [...]

Senate confirmation hearings for US Attorney General nominee Michael B. Mukasey will begin October 17 , Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said Wednesday. Leahy has already outlined for Mukasey several issues of "concern" , including: how you would ensure the independence of federal law enforcement from political pressure, what steps you would take [...]

Former US President Jimmy Carter said Wednesday that under the Bush administration the United States "for the first time in my lifetime has abandoned the basic principles of human rights". He told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an interview : "We've said that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to these people in Abu Ghraib prison [...]

The US District Court for the District of Columbia Wednesday conducted an evidentiary hearing in the decade-old Indian Trust case . The class-action suit involves the alleged mismanagement by the US Department of the Interior of American Indian money , including lease and sales revenues, permit fees and interest, received and held for Native Americans [...]

France Wednesday formally agreed to abolish the death penalty in all circumstances when it ratified a provision of the European Convention on Human Rights . Since its 2003 inception, Protocol 13 , designed to allow signatories to "take the final step in order to abolish the death penalty in all circumstances," has been adopted by [...]

The US Department of Justice filed notice Tuesday that it will appeal last month's district court decision that found provisions of the USA Patriot Act to be unconstitutional . The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) used the Patriot Act to search the home and office of Brandon Mayfield , the Oregon lawyer who was arrested [...]