[JURIST] Ireland approved [press release] the European Union (EU) reform treaty, known as the Lisbon Treaty [EU materials; text], in a second referendum vote held Friday, the European Commission announced Saturday. The vote, which amends Ireland's constitution, was approved by approximately 67 percent of voters, according to an official poll [results]. European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso applauded [statement, PDF] the treaty's approval, saying that the results show Ireland's recognition of the EU's role in responding to the economic crisis. Irish voters originally rejected the referendum over a year ago, but the government agreed to hold a second vote [JURIST reports] after the EU offered guarantees on representation, national sovereignty, and other legal matters.

Efforts to ratify [JURIST news archive] the treaty in all 27 member countries have been met with some obstacles, but Ireland's approval may now pave the way for the treaty to enter into effect. Last week, German President Horst Koehler [official website, in German] signed [JURIST report] the Lisbon Treaty, completing that country's problematic ratification process. Although the treaty has now been approved in 25 countries, Ireland's rejection of the treaty last year led Czech President Vaclav Klaus [official website] to refuse to sign the measure, despite approval [JURIST report] by the country's senate. In July 2008, Polish President Lech Kaczynski [official website] also refused to sign [JURIST report] the treaty despite parliamentary approval, calling it "pointless" in light of the Irish rejection.

[JURIST] A judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia [official website] on Friday ordered [order, PDF; memorandum opinion PDF] the US Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] to release some files from its interview with former vice president Dick Cheney [BBC profile] over his role in leaking the name of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] agent Valerie Plame [BBC profile; JURIST news archive]. The lawsuit, filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) [advocacy website] under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [text], sought more than 60 pages of interviews that the FBI and the DOJ conducted with Cheney. The DOJ withheld all of the pages detailing Cheney's interview, claiming that statutory exemptions under FOIA permitted them to do so for national security purposes. Ordering a partial release of the documents, Judge Emmet Sullivan said:

[T]he Court concludes that the agency has met its burden of demonstrating that certain limited information was appropriately withheld from disclosure to protect the well-recognized deliberative process and presidential communications privileges under Exemption 5, personal privacy under Exemptions 6 and 7(C), and national security interests under Exemptions 1 and 3. The Court cannot, however, permit the government to withhold the records in their entirety under Exemption 7(A) on the basis that disclosure might interfere with some unidentifiable and unspecified future law enforcement proceedings.

[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Friday that a lawsuit against Canadian oil exploration company Talisman Energy [corporate website] for alleged human rights violations in Sudan should be dismissed. The court affirmed the lower court's finding [opinion, PDF] that the plaintiffs, including the Presbyterian Church of Sudan, failed to establish that Talisman acted with the purpose of aiding the Sudanese government's violations of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The suit was originally brought in 2001 under the Alien Tort Claims Act [text] and claimed that the company supported the government's creation of buffer zones around its oil fields, resulting in the displacement of civilians. Ruling that complicity in the government's actions was not enough for the case to proceed, the court reasoned that:

[P]laintiffs must establish that Talisman acted with the purpose to assist the Government's violations of customary international law. Plaintiffs have provided evidence that the Government violated customary international law; but they provide no evidence that Talisman acted with the purpose to support the Government's offenses. Plaintiffs do not suggest in their briefs that Talisman was a partisan in regional, religious, or ethnic hostilities, or that Talisman acted with the purpose to assist persecution. To the contrary, the actions of the Sudanese government threatened the security of the company’s operations, tarnished its reputation, angered its employees and management, and ultimately forced Talisman to abandon the venture.