Rights

Two Algerians held for seven years without charge or trial at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay l have been acquitted after after a trial back home in Algeria, their defense lawyer said yesterday.
Faghoul Abdelli and Mohamed Terari were arrested in Afghanistan by Pakistani police following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. They had [...]

Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed, an Algerian national who was captured in Pakistan and turned over to the U.S. military after fleeing from Afghanistan, was ordered released from the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay by a U.S. District Court judge yesterday, according to the human rights group CagePrisoners. Judge Gladys Kessler’s written opinion is still [...]

Jesselyn Radack at Daily Kos has a nice roundup of yesterday’s Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, called and led by Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who opened the morning session with an announcement that the shootings of 13 soldiers on the U.S. Army base was a “terrorist” attack as opposed to a mass-murder. Never mind that [...]

Testifying at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing this morning, Attorney General Eric Holder promised to produce the evidence, withheld by the Department of Justice, that some Democratic Senators believe is necessary for an informed debate on the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act.
As I reported yesterday, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Richard [...]

The International Center for Transitional Justice usually focuses on bringing to light and holding perpetrators accountable for such heinous crimes as genocide, mass murder and systematic torture, often in far-off war-torn countries with dismal human rights records.
So it’s significant that today they’ve released a report calling on the United States to follow its legal obligation [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder just announced that he will seek the death penalty for the five 9/11 terror suspects. They will be tried in a New York federal court, as reported earlier this morning.

Even though the military justice system hasn’t actually executed anyone in over 50 years, military prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty in the case of alleged Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, The Wall Street Journal reports this morning. Hasan was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder on Thursday. That’s not [...]

Crimes that occur on military bases are usually heard in the military justice system. But while that may sound harsher than a civilian court, the sentences usually turn out to be more lenient.
The result is that Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist who allegedly gunned down 13 people at the military base in Texas last [...]

Praising an Italian court’s recent ruling that CIA agents broke the law in an extraordinary rendition case, The New York Times today highlights a growing phenomenon that hasn’t received sufficient attention: European courts appear more willing than their American counterparts to enforce the laws protecting basic human and civil rights.

The influential Center for American Progress, which has close ties to the Obama administration, is now calling on President Obama to push back the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center to July. That’s despite the president’s day-two directive to close the notorious prison by January. Closure has been impeded by the inability to send [...]