Search Results for: 2014-09-18

Uganda’s Constitutional Court on Wednesday upheld most provisions of controversial legislation that imposes a sentence of death by hanging against individuals convicted of “aggravated homosexuality.” In upholding the Anti-Homosexuality Act, the court maintained that though the country’s penal code is “undoubtedly … considered to be a relic from the country’s colonial past,” the bill’s overwhelming [...]

The recent Australian High Court ruling in NZYQ v. Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs has prompted significant developments in Australia’s immigration detention policies. This commentary examines the legal implications of the ruling, the subsequent legislative response, and the ongoing concerns raised by human rights and refugee advocates. A History of Mandatory Detention for [...]

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear an appeal from Derek Lee, a man convicted of second-degree murder who is challenging the state’s law requiring mandatory life prison sentences for those found guilty of the offense who did not intend to kill. The court granted Lee’s petition for an appeal on the [...]

Detained Hong Kong pro-democracy activist and media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai’s international legal team filed an urgent appeal on Thursday with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The team alleged that the Chinese authorities tortured a key prosecution witness to coerce him into providing incriminating evidence [...]

Editors’ note: Amid surging violence between Hamas and Israeli forces, JURIST is seeking perspectives from law students, law professors and lawyers around the world. Neither this nor other commentaries constitute JURIST editorial policy, nor do they necessarily reflect the opinions of the editorial team. Scholars of genocide argue that Israel’s siege of Gaza, which involved [...]

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Monday the Government of India may have carried out the murder of Sikh community leader and gurdwara president Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down on June 18 in the parking lot of his Surrey, British Columbia place of worship.  Nijjar advocated for the establishment of an independent [...]

Sexual assault in the US Armed Forces is a very real and prescient issue for all service members. In April 2023, the US Department of Defense (DoD) reported that in 2022 there had been “a roughly 1% increase in overall reports of sexual assaults” with all the service branches having seen an increase in reported [...]

Economist and foreign policy expert Jeffrey Sachs, a best selling author and director of Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, has long argued that Russia’s hostility toward Ukraine was provoked by the U.S. vis-à-vis pushes for NATO expansion, military interventions, and other forms of meddling. In an interview with JURIST Assistant Editor Pitasanna Shanmugathas, Sachs [...]

A three-member International Criminal Court (ICC) panel authorized the ICC prosecutor’s office to continue its crimes against humanity investigation in Venezuela on Tuesday over Venezuela’s objections. Judges Péter Kovács, Reine Adélaïde Sophie Alapini-Gansou, and María del Socorro Flores Lier held that the domestic Venezuelan investigation into the crimes does not have a sufficiently wide scope, [...]

Ukrainian law students and young lawyers are reporting for JURIST on developments in and affecting Ukraine. This dispatch is from Kateryna Prychta, a law student at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.   After the start of full-scale military attacks by the Russian Federation’s armed forces on the territory of Ukraine, at the beginning of March, Ukraine appealed to [...]