Human rights violations remain a problem in the United States, including illegal wiretapping, police abuse, wrongful convictions, and the world's highest ratio of people behind bars, according to a report released Thursday by China. The Human Rights Record of the US in 2005 was released in response to the US State Department's annual 2005 Country [...]

Leading Tuesday's international brief, the Supreme Court of India has exercised a rarely used power and sentenced Zahira Sheikh for deliberately retracting her testimony concerning the arson of the Best Bakery in the state of Gujarat during riots anti-Muslim riots by Hindu civilians that resulted in dozens of deaths. Sheikh's sentence is a rare use [...]

Serbia and Montenegro Wednesday contested the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice at The Hague to hear a case brought by Bosnia accusing Serbia's predecessor state Yugoslavia of perpetrating state-sponsored genocide during the 1992-1995 Bosnian Wars. Lawyers for Serbia argued that the conflict was between ethnic groups and not the two sovereign states appearing [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Wendy J. Keefer, former senior counsel and chief of staff in the US Department of Justice Office of Legal Policy and now with Bancroft Associates in Washington DC, says that although the end result of the Patriot Act reauthorization process is not perfect, most of the changes made by the two [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist P. Sabin Willett, a partner at Bingham McCutchen, LLP, working pro bono with a team of Bingham lawyers in the Guantanamo habeas litigation, says that the detention of a Chinese Uighur is just one proof that the general, officially-articulated proposition that Guantanamo holds terrorists is a lie… Adel's anniversary is coming [...]

Results of a new study released by the Dublin Roman Catholic archdiocese in Ireland show that while 102 Dublin priests are suspected of abusing children since 1940 and 32 of them are facing lawsuits, only eight have actually been convicted of criminal offenses. Even so, the legal bill for the archdiocese has already has paid [...]

Tahira Bland : "Anne Bryson, Gina Mosley, and I have been assigned to a non-profit law firm, the Justice Center. The primary focus of the Justice Center is to provide indigent criminal defense. Hurricane Katrina caused severe damage to legal institutions in New Orleans. For example, the state courthouse suffered extensive damage from flooding. Critical [...]

2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, March 8, 2006 . Read the full text of the reports. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

USA PATRIOT Act Additional Reauthorizing Amendments Act of 2006, US Congress, March 7, 2006 . Read the full text of the Act . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The US House Appropriations Committee late Wednesday voted 62-2 to amend an emergency appropriations bill for Iraq and Gulf Coast reconstruction with a provision blocking a controversial takeover of operations at six US ports by United Arab Emirates-owned Dubai Ports World . The amendment, which is expected to be debated in the full House next [...]