A Blog on International Justice
The UK government is still determined to achieve Abu Qatada’s deportation to Jordan. Back in March, the British Home Secretary Theresa Maw had lost her appeal against the special immigrations appeals commission (SIAC) ruling preventing the deportation of Abu Qatada. Latest developments in the Qatada case have come up this week. On Tuesday 23 April, [...]
Ben Emmerson, the United Nations’ (UN) special rapporteur on protection of human rights and counter terrorism has called on the government of the United States to release the findings of inquiry into the secret Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) detention and interrogation practices. Mr. Emmerson, speaking at the presentation of his report on the promotion and [...]
International Multiplier Conference by the Leuven Institute of Criminology (LINC) under the auspices of ART-IP project (Awareness Raising and Training Measures for the Istanbul Protocol in Europe) Date: 15 March 2013, 9.30 to 17.15 Venue: Small Aula (room 00.15), Faculty of Theology, Maria Theresia College, Leuven, Belgium Torture and related acts constitute one of the [...]
Today, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) found the “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” responsible for torture, ill-treatment and secret rendition of Khaled El-Masri. The case was brought before the ECtHR by Mr. El-Masri, a German national of Lebanese origin, who complained that he had been a victim of a secret “rendition” operation during [...]
Mr Erwin Sperisen, a Swiss and Guatemalan citizen, was arrested yesterday in Geneva for crimes he allegedly committed between 2004 and 2007 in his capacity of Head of Police of Guatemala. The charges relate, in particular, to cases of extra-judicial executions, torture, forced disappearance and rape perpetrated by the police forces under his control. In [...]
On 6 July 2012, Italy’s highest court, the Corte di Cassazione, issued its final ruling on what has been described by Amnesty International as “the most serious suspension of democratic rights in a Western Country since the Second World War”. This landmark judgment concerned events surrounding the G8 summit hosted by Italy over ten years ago, [...]
Last week, a tribunal in Kuala Lumpur found former US President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld guilty of conspiracy to allow torture in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram and Abu Ghraib. The conviction, which is the first of its kind anywhere in the world, came after a week-long trial [...]
Former UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw might face civil proceedings for his role in the rendition of Libyan military commander Abdel Hakim Belhadj. Mr Belhadj is today a powerful member of the transitional government in Tripoli. Before the civil war, however, he was among the most prominent opponents of the Gaddafi regime, which accused him [...]
According to Human Rights Watch, the leaders of the Libyan city of Misrata could be held criminally responsible for ongoing serious crimes by forces under their command, including before the International Criminal Court in The Hague. This would be consistent with the UN Commission of Inquiry’s conclusion that militias from Misrata had apparently committed crimes [...]
A memorandum drafted by Philip Zelikow on 15 February 2006 was recently made public. Zelikow, a high-ranking State Department lawyer and close advisor of Condoleeza Rice, reviewed both American and international jurisprudence and came to the conclusion that the thirteen ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ the CIA were authorised to use amounted to ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading [...]
In his latest report, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment condemns the US for prolonged solitary confinement of Mr. Bradley E. Manning, a US soldier charged with the unauthorised disclosure of classified information to Wikileaks. Mr. Manning was reportedly held in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day following his arrest in [...]