Maher Arar may not have been able to persuade the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his appeal for redress after U.S. officials rendered him to Syria to be tortured. But Arar and his lawyers with the Center for Constitutional Rights are now disclosing that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have More…
Via Kevin Drum, the Toronto Star reports that Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen captured in 2002 by U.S. officials and sent to Syria for a year’s worth of torture, has lost his appeal for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Center for Constitutional Rights’s Maria LaHood More…
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 More…
Twenty-four-year-old Amir Meshal, the son of Muslim immigrants from Egypt, was a lifelong resident of New Jersey when, after living briefly in Cairo with extended family members, in 2006 he decided to go to Somalia to study Islam and experience living under Islamic law. The country appeared to have stabilized More…
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.
Maher Arar is a More…
As the pressure grows on the Obama administration to close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay by January, so too does the risk that some of the Guantanamo detainees cleared for release could be returned to countries where they’ll face persecution or torture, More…
Maybe it’s a cultural thing, but Canadians seem so much more willing to apologize for their mistakes than Americans do.
According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, a committee in Parliament is planning to recommend that the Canadian government compensate and apologize to three Arab-Canadian men who were imprisoned and tortured More…
When I watched Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s questioning of the government’s lawyer in the extraordinary rendition case of Arar v. Ashcroft in December, which I wrote about in detail Wednesday, I was struck by Sotomayor’s immediate grasp of the troubling implications of the government’s position.
As More…
Most commentators and reporters have assumed that when it comes to Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s record, there’s little to suggest how she might rule on critical matters of executive power and national security that are sure to be among the most controversial issues before the court in the next few years. More…
Since my earlier post on Yaser Hamdi’s express agreement not to sue the United States for his indefinite detention and mistreatment, Cornell Law Professor Michael Dorf, who analyzed the Hamdi agreement shortly after it was reached, has provided a helpful clue as to why we may not be More…
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