NewsHere’s the international legal news we covered this week:
[JURIST] The US Senate Appropriations Committee unanimously approved [press release] $51.35 billion in funding on Thursday for state and foreign appropriations [text, PDF], including $10 million to help fund the UN agency that oversees the Paris Climate Agreement.
[JURIST] A Turkish court released a Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) [party website] parliamentarian Thursday, according to a HDP statement [press release].
[JURIST] The Spanish Constitutional Court [official website] on Thursday suspended [judgment, PDF, in Spanish] the Catalan independence referendum.
An administrative court under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA court) [text] in Mumbai on Thursday sentenced [Reuters report] Feroz Abdul Rashid Khan and Taher Merchant to death and Abu Salem and Karimullah Khan to life imprisonment for their involvement in the 1993 Mumbai blasts [BBC backgrounder] that killed 300 individuals and injured hundreds more.
The Australia High Court [official website] on Thursday unanimously dismissed [transcript, PDF] a legal challenge to a same-sex marriage postal survey, thereby allowing the general public to vote directly on whether same-sex marriage should be legalized.
Widespread human rights violations continue in war-torn Syria despite a decrease in fighting between warring parties, according to a report [text, PDF] released Wednesday by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, an investigatory branch of the UN Human Rights Council [official websites].
[JURIST] Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] reported [text] on Tuesday that security forces under the administration of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi have systematically used torture methods against political detainees that likely amount to crimes against humanity.
[JURIST] The European Court of Justice (ECJ) [official website] ruled [text] on Wednesday that a 2009 antitrust case should be sent back to the lower court in order to reexamine the €1.06 billion fine placed on Intel [corporate website] in the matter.
Four UN human rights experts on Tuesday called on [press release] China to release a prominent human rights lawyer who has been detained since November 2016.
Brazil’s Attorney General Rodrigo Janot [official website, in Portuguese] announced [press release, in Portuguese] Tuesday that former Brazilian presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, along with other senior members of the Worker’s Party, were being charged [indictment, PDF, in Portuguese] with leading a criminal organization.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres [official website] called on the government of Myanmar Tuesday to grant [press statements] nationality, or at least legal status, to the Rohingya Muslim minority group that resides in the Rakhine State of Myanmar.
The European Court of Justice [official website] on Wednesday ruled [judgment] that Slovakia and Hungary must host asylum seekers as a part of the EU migration policy [EU materials].
[JURIST] Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] on Tuesday condemned [report] both China’s oppression of critics of the nation’s human rights record and the UN’s failure to stop such conduct.
[JURIST] US President [more]
Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga [BBC profile], whose campaign against the incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta [government website] was declared unsuccessful after a countrywide election last month by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Committee (IEBC) [government website], has issued a statement [BBC report] that he would not be participating in the October re-election process.
[JURIST] The UN Commission of Inquiry on Burundi [official website] reported [materials] on Monday that various crimes against humanity have been committed in the troubled country since investigations began in April 2015.
[JURIST] The Guatemalan Supreme Court [official website, in Spanish] ruled on Monday that legislators will review a request to lift President Jimmy Morales’s immunity from prosecution amid mounting evidence of illegal political financing.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) [official website] on Wednesday ruled 11-6 [judgment] that unrestricted monitoring of an employee’s communication by his or her employer constitutes a violation of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 8) [text, PDF], concerning the “right to respect for private and family life.” This ruling concerns a 2007 incident [press release, PDF] wherein a private company in Romania was monitoring the Yahoo! Messenger communications of its employee, Bogdan Mihai Bărbulescu, who was asked to create the messenger account to respond to client inquiries.
Kem Sokha, head of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) [party website] was charged Tuesday with treason after his arrest on Sunday.
[JURIST] Colombia’s government signed a peace agreement with the National Liberation Army (ELN) [InSight Crime profile] in Ecuador on Monday, two days before Pope Francis’s visit to the country.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein [official profile] appealed [press release] to the international community Tuesday to conduct an investigation into allegations of human rights abuses and violations of international humanitarian law in Yemen, after a new UN report [text] revealed that such violations continue with no apparent end in sight.
