Search Results for: 2016-09-26

Under President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s leadership, the Sri Lankan civil war reached a brutal conclusion on May 18, 2009, ending a 25-year-long conflict between the Sri Lankan government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a separatist rebel group. Rooted in longstanding grievances, including discriminatory policies against Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, the conflict saw the [...]

Spokesperson for Iran’s Foreign Ministry Nasser Kanaani stated in a news conference Monday that Iran will continue to seek the release of former Iranian official Hamid Nouri, whose conviction and sentence of life in prison for human rights abuses in Sweden was upheld last week in the Svea Court of Appeal. Kanaani stated that the [...]

A California federal grand jury indicted Hunter Biden, the son of US President Joe Biden, on Thursday on nine new federal criminal tax charges. The new charges join the two previous charges filed against him in a federal court in Delaware. Biden now faces 11 charges in total—three felonies and eight misdemeanors. The indictment concerns [...]

Joshua Villanueva is a JURIST Assistant Editor and a 2L at UC Law San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings), He files this dispatch from San Francisco.  Beginning this weekend, world leaders will gather in San Francisco for the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ Week, the largest international event this vibrant city will have witnessed since [...]

Recently, Thailand passed an important human rights law following significant pressure from many parties including NGOs, victims of torture, relatives of the dead and missing, and investigative journalists. On 24 October 2022, the King signed into law the Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearances Act which Parliament enacted on 26 August 2022. This [...]

International human rights charities Redress and Free Nazanin Wednesday released a report describing Iranian authorities’ actions, especially in the midst of the nationwide Mahsa Amini protests, as “state hostage-taking.” The nearly 50-page report argues Iran has institutionalized state hostage-taking through the practice of arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment of foreign and dual nationals to obtain diplomatic [...]

Marisa Wright is a US National Correspondent for JURIST, and a 2L at Harvard Law School.  The U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments next Monday in a case that could have major implications for racial equality and college admissions. The case, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, [...]

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch Tuesday called for the immediate release of Algerian activist Slimane Bouhafs. According to organizations, Algerian authorities have progressively employed the Algerian penal code’s wide definition of terrorism to prosecute activists and human rights defenders and targeted other critics among the Algerian diaspora with travel bans and extradition. In 2016, [...]

The US Supreme Court on Thursday vacated three orders issued by lower courts in Arizona, Indiana, and Arkansas that had invalidated state-level abortion on the grounds of Roe v. Wade. This follows the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe last Friday. The now-vacated Arizona ruling had stopped a state law that criminalized abortions performed on fetuses with non-lethal [...]

While abortion has been a hotbed of controversy in America for decades, many states, especially those governed by conservatives, have lately expressed interest or have introduced bills and laws to significantly restrict abortion. The recent highlight is the draft of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization’s judgment by the US Supreme Court leaked by Politico. [...]