UN General Assembly President Jan Eliasson on Thursday unveiled a draft proposal for a new United Nations human rights body that would replace the highly criticized Commission on Human Rights . The blueprint describes a 47-member Human Rights Council whose membership would be open to all UN member states. States would be elected to the [...]

UK Human Rights: A Broken Promise, Amnesty International, February 23, 2006 . Read the full text of the report. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Human Rights Report 2005, UK House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, February 23, 2006 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

A Human Rights Watch expert Thursday told members of a European Parliament committee formed to investigate allegations that the US has transferred prisoners through Europe on secret extraordinary rendition flights that the United States has gone to great lengths to cover up evidence of the flights and urged the EU lawmakers to encourage other witnesses [...]

HealthSouth on Thursday finalized a settlement agreement with plaintiffs in several federal securities class action suits for a total $445 million. HealthSouth itself will pay defrauded investors $215 million, and its insurance carriers will pay $230 million, pending final approval by the court. Additionally, the settlement agreement will remit to defrauded investors 25 percent of [...]

The International Labour Organization (ILO) , a UN agency, on Thursday officially adopted the long-debated Maritime Labour Convention , a bill of rights applicable to maritime workers that sets minimum standards for wages, work-to-rest ratios, and lays out comprehensive health and safety standards. The convention will become effective upon ratification by 30 of the 100 [...]

Opposition politicians in Uganda have said that Thursday's election, the first multi-party elections held in the country in more than twenty years, was marred by fraud. Though it appears that incumbent President Yoweri Museveni will win re-election, claims of voting fraud have been leveled at the ruling party by challenger Kizza Besigye of the opposition [...]

Two separate reports issued in Britain Thursday strongly criticized the anti-terror strategy of Prime Minister Tony Blair's government, documenting domestic deprivations of human rights, condemning UK policy on torture, and urging the government to press the US to shut down its controversial detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The annual human rights report of the [...]

An Amnesty International spokesman said Thursday in Berlin that torture was still practiced and legally recognized in Turkey despite the latest reform efforts of the Turkish government. Wolfgang Grenz made the statement at the presentation of a new study of 18 cases carried out by a German investigator in October. Grenz said that Turkish courts [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has granted a rehearing in a case challenging the native-only admissions policy of a Hawaiian school. In August 2005, the Ninth Circuit ruled that the admissions policy of the Kamehameha Schools , which accepts no federal funding, violated 42 USC 1981 , a law forbidding racial [...]