China's Supreme People's Court (SPC) Thursday announced plans to phase out gunshot executions of condemned prisoners and instead switch to lethal injections . Court vice-president Jiang Xingchang said that lethal injection was a more humane execution method already used by half of China's intermediate courts. He said that the SPC will work to train court [...]

A new labor law that requires all Chinese workers to have written employment contracts went into effect on January 1 in China , Bloomberg reported Wednesday. The Contract Labor Law also gives Chinese workers the right to severance pay upon termination, sets a minimum wage, and puts limits on the amount of overtime that companies [...]

The US District Court for the Eastern District of New York has ruled that human rights organizations possess the same right to protect sources when reporting on human rights abuses as traditional journalists. Magistrate Viktor Pohorelsky found on Tuesday that Amnesty International was not required to reveal the names of lawyers that the group quoted [...]

China is imposing new controls on online videos, according to Chinese government websites Thursday. Under new regulations, videos will henceforward have to be posted on the websites of state-controlled companies. Websites will also be banned from providing videos that reveal state secrets, encourage social upheaval, or distribute pornography. It is unclear how the new regulations, [...]

An Indonesian court ruled Thursday that the trial of the head of Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiyah can proceed. A defense lawyer for Abu Dujana moved to dismiss the trial, arguing that the South Jakarta court had no jurisdiction over his client as the crimes he is charged with were not alleged to have [...]

Basil Fernando : "This note confines itself to the legal implications of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, though in fact it will also be felt enormously politically and socially. It is important to note that the assassination has taken place shortly after the country's higher judiciary was virtually wiped out by the dismissal of forty [...]

US District Judge Laura Swain Wednesday dismissed Spanish damage claims against the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), a non-profit organization that inspects and certifies ships, in connection with a major 2002 oil spill. Spain had filed suit in the Southern District of New York against ABS after the Bahamas-flagged oil tanker Prestige sank off the [...]

Kenyan Attorney General Amos Wako called Thursday for an independent investigation of the disputed reelection of President Mwai Kibaki amid continued violent protests. In a public statement carried in the Nairobi Daily Nation newspaper, he warned that Kenya “is quickly degenerating into a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions” and that the situation, if left unchecked, “will [...]

John Kamm "The detention of Hu Jia on December 27, 2007 for "incitement to subversion" is the most important move against the small but increasingly defiant community of human rights defenders and dissidents in China in recent months. We do not know the specifics of what he is suspected of, and are unlikely to know [...]

State of California v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, January 2, 2008 . Read the full text of the petition. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.