[JURIST] Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council [official website; JURIST news archive] draft resolution [text] Friday which would have imposed sanctions on Zimbabwe [JURIST news archive]. The three other permanent members of the Security Council, the US, Britain and France, voted in favor of the sanctions, arguing that such measures were needed to respond to the repression and violence linked to Zimbabwe’s widely-discredited presidential election [JURIST news archive]. The draft resolution was submitted by the US [JURIST report] to the Security Council last week, and called for sanctions against Zimbabwe's newly reinstalled president Robert Mugabe [BBC profile; JURIST news archive] and 13 of his top military and government officials. The draft resolution would have imposed a targeted sanctions scheme on Zimbabwe, including an embargo on all military or arms shipments and sales to the country, as well as travel bans and asset freezes on Mugabe and his associates. The draft resolution also called for Zimbabwe's government to accept mediation efforts by the African Union, the Southern African Development Community, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon [official websites]. AP has more. BBC News has additional coverage.

Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai [BBC profile; JURIST news archive], presidential candidate of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) [party website], are disputing the results of the recent presidential elections [JURIST news archive]. Tsvangirai is currently taking refuge [JURIST report] at the Dutch embassy in Harare. The MDC has estimated that at least 65 of its members have been killed [BBC report] since the first election in March. Human rights groups suggested that state-sponsored violence would only increase as the second presidential vote drew closer, and in the past few weeks the amount of election-related violence has increased, including the beating [ABC News report], torture [National Post report], and killing [NYT report] of MDC supporters throughout Zimbabwe. Last month, Mugabe's government expelled a UN human rights observer [JURIST news report]. Earlier in June, government forces stopped and detained US and UK diplomats [JURIST report], threatening them and beating one of their drivers.

[JURIST] The Office of the Chief Prosecutor [official website] of the International Criminal Court (ICC) [official website] filed a petition [PDF text] Friday asking the ICC to lift an indefinite stay on the trial of Congolese ex-militia leader Thomas Lubanga [ICC materials; JURIST news archive]. The ICC had imposed the stay [order, PDF; JURIST report] last month due to prosecutorial misconduct, concluding that Lubanga [BBC profile] would be unable to receive a fair trial if his defense were not granted access to classified testimony of prosecution witnesses. The ICC subsequently ordered Lubanga freed [JURIST report], but then agreed to suspend his release until the court reaches a final decision on the prosecutors' appeal [text, PDF]. Friday's petition contains a proposal from the UN that would allow the ICC judges to review the sensitive material to determine whether or not the information must be presented to Lubanga's defense lawyers. According to the proposal, if the information is deemed necessary to ensure the fairness of the trial, a summary of the information without personal details of the witnesses would be prepared and presented to the defense. AFP has more.

Once the leader of the Union of Patriotic Congolese [GlobalSecurity backgrounder], Lubanga is charged with using child soldiers [JURIST report; BBC report] in his militia, which is believed to have committed large-scale human rights abuses in Congo's violent Ituri district [HRW backgrounder]. He became the first war crimes defendant to appear before the ICC after he was taken into custody [JURIST reports] in March 2006. Lubanga's long-delayed trial [JURIST report] is scheduled to be the ICC's first since its creation in 2002.

[JURIST] A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled [opinion text, PDF] Friday that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [official website] does not have the authority to institute a "cap-and-trade" policy for controlling levels of soot and smog emissions. The Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) [PDF text, EPA backgrounder] was intended to permanently cap emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides across 28 eastern states and would have reduced the levels of those pollutants by 70 percent and 60 percent respectively. The emission caps were expected to result in $85 to $100 billion in direct health benefits and almost $2 billion in visibility benefits by 2015. The court's decision rejected the entire regulation, calling the EPA's approach to emissions control caps "fundamentally flawed," and saying that the legislation would not "survive remand in anything approaching recognizable form." AP has more. The Washington Post has additional coverage.

The action [ClimateIntel report] was brought by the state of North Carolina and a number of power companies for various reasons, including the differences between the CAIR and the broader Clean Air Act (CAA) [text, JURIST news archive], the belief that the CAIR would not effectively reduce emissions, and the prescribed compliance deadline. Friday's ruling follows a February decision [PDF text; JURIST report] by the same court which held the EPA's Clean Air Mercury Rule [EPA backgrounder; JURIST report] to be invalid. That rule intended to use a similar "cap-and-trade" policy to reduce mercury emissions from power plants by 70 percent. The February decision was appealed by the Bush administration [JURIST report] in March.

[JURIST] International Criminal Court (ICC) [official website; JURIST news archive] chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo [official profile] will seek a warrant to arrest Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir [BBC profile], according to statements [press briefing; video] made Friday by US State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack. Moreno-Ocampo is expected to present evidence [ICC media advisory] of human rights crimes allegedly committed in the Sudanese region of Darfur [JURIST news archive]. Sudanese Foreign Affairs Minister Al-Samani al-Wasila counseled against the indictment, asserting that it would destroy the country's peace process. Sudanese Ambassador to the UN Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamed told reporters [AP report] that

If you indict our head of state, the symbol of our country, the symbol of our dignity, then the sky's the limit for our reactions ... It will have far-reaching, bad implications for the entire country.

[JURIST] The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court [official website] ruled Thursday in Charron v. Amaral [opinion text] that couples married after the court's decision legalizing same-sex marriage cannot make claims for benefits they would have received had they been allowed to marry sooner. The plaintiff in the case, Michelle Charron, brought a medical malpractice suit against a group of doctors for misdiagnosis of breast cancer in 2003. When Charron died in 2006, her spouse Cynthia Kalish attempted to advance the lawsuit as a tort action for loss of consortium. The couple were married less than a year after Charron's diagnosis following the court's 2004 decision in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health [text; JURIST report]. The court rejected Kalish's argument that she was entitled to relief because the couple would have married sooner had such marriage been legal, explaining that Goodridge was not to be applied retroactively. The court also stressed that allowing recovery in the case would open the door to increased litigation:

We also reject Kalish's argument that we should allow her to recover for the loss of consortium because she meets all other criteria for recovery and would have been married but for the legal prohibition. Goodridge granted same-sex couples the right to choose to be married after a specific date; the court never stated that people in same-sex, committed relationships (including the Goodridge plaintiffs, who had applied for, and were denied, marriage licenses) would be considered married before they obtained a marriage license. ... Instead, as discussed, one of the grounds on which the Goodridge court based its decision regarding the constitutionality of the marriage licensing statute was that so many benefits flowed only from being married. ... [t]o allow Kalish to recover for a loss of consortium if she can prove she would have been married but for the ban on same-sex marriage could open numbers of cases in all areas of law to the same argument.