Human Rights Law

Bradley Manning Treatment Reveals Continued Government Complicity in Torture

Posted on March 26, 2011
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is facing court-martial for leaking military reports and diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks, is being held in solitary confinement in Quantico brig in Virginia. Each night, he is forced to strip naked and sleep in a gown made of coarse material...

Stop Bombing Libya

Posted on March 22, 2011
Since Saturday night, the United States, France, and Britain have been bombing Libya with cruise missiles, B-2 stealth bombers, F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, and Harrier attack jets. There is no reliable estimate of the number of civilians killed. The U...

Assault on Collective Bargaining Illegal, Says International Labor Rights Group

Posted on March 12, 2011
By Jeanne Mirer and Marjorie CohnThe International Commission for Labor Rights (ICLR) sent a notice to the Wisconsin Legislature, explaining that its attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from public workers is illegal.Anyone who has watched the events unfolding in Wisconsin and other states that are trying to remove collective bargaining rights from public workers has heard people protesting the loss of their ?rights...

Law professor says Egypt was a common destination for torture of detainees sent by U.S.

Posted on February 16, 2011
National Law Journal interview of Marjorie Cohn by Amanda Bronstad: On Feb. 11, outgoing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned, leaving the country's government under military rule and its hopes for democracy uncertain. Also unclear is whether the country's history of human rights abuses and torture will continue in Egypt, according to Marjorie Cohn, editor and co-author of The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

U.S. Chickens Come Home to Roost in Egypt

Posted on February 02, 2011
Barack Obama, like his predecessors, has supported Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to the tune of $1.3 billion annually, mostly in military aid. In return, Egypt minds U.S. interests in the Middle East, notably providing a buffer between Israel and the rest of the Arab world...

Obama: Create Jobs by Executive Order

Posted on November 07, 2010
By Jeanne Mirer and Marjorie CohnOn May 6, 1935, with the country in the midst of the Great Depression, and with indirect efforts to create jobs having not moved the needle of unemployment rates, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7034 and appropriated $4...

Let's Rally to Restore Peace

Posted on November 01, 2010
In their Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert effectively demonstrated how the media hypes fear. They brought out Kareem Abdul Jabbar to show that not all Muslims are terrorists. A couple of musical numbers dealt with the wars we are fighting...

Israel Raid on Gaza Flotilla: US Failure to Condemn Despite UN Findings

Posted on October 14, 2010
On May 31, the Israeli military attacked a flotilla of ships in international waters. The vessels were carrying humanitarian supplies to the people in the Gaza Strip, who suffer under a punishing blockade by Israel. The stated aims of the flotilla were to draw international attention to the situation in Gaza and the effect of the blockade; to break the blockade; and to deliver humanitarian assistance and supplies to Gaza...

Bradley Manning: An American Hero

Posted on September 19, 2010
Army Pfc. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking military secrets to the public. This week, his supporters are holding rallies in 21 cities, seeking Manning?s release from military custody. Manning is in the brig for allegedly disclosing a classified video depicting U...

Business as Usual in Iraq

Posted on September 13, 2010
Last week, President Obama ceremoniously announced that U.S. combat operations had ended in Iraq. As Democrats face an uphill battle in the upcoming midterm elections, Obama felt he had to make good on his campaign promise to move the fighting from Iraq to Afghanistan...

California Assembly Votes to Report on Human Rights to U.N. Committees

Posted on August 19, 2010
On August 9, the California Assembly took the historic step of becoming the first state to agree to publicize the text of three ratified U.N. human rights treaties, and to submit the required reports to the State Department for consideration by the U...

Landmark Ruling Declares Prop 8 Unconstitutional

Posted on August 08, 2010
In a stunning, carefully crafted 136-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker held in Perry v. Schwarzenegger that California?s Proposition 8, which outlaws same-sex marriage, is unconstitutional. The lawsuit was filed by two gay couples who sought to overturn Prop 8...

Puerto Rican Political Prisoner Carlos Alberto Torres Released Today After 30 Years

Posted on July 27, 2010
Today, Puerto Rican political prisoner Carlos Alberto Torres walked out of prison after 30 years behind bars. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy - conspiring to use force against the lawful authority of the United States over Puerto Rico. Torres was punished for being a member of an armed clandestine organization called the FALN, which had taken responsibility for bombings in the Chicago area that resulted in no deaths or injuries...

John McCain on Iraq: ?We Already Won That One'

Posted on July 26, 2010
On July 15, I attended a reception in Washington DC to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the normalization of relations between the United States and Vietnam. Geoff Millard and I spoke to Sen. John McCain. When Geoff introduced himself as chairman of the board of Iraq Veterans against the War, McCain retorted, ?You?re too late...

Losing in Afghanistan

Posted on July 06, 2010
Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama?s troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the President a blank check. One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable...

Israel Murders Human Rights Workers Delivering Humanitarian Aid

Posted on May 31, 2010
On Sunday, Israel murdered human rights workers who were attempting to deliver 10,000 tons of humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza, because Gaza has been virtually cut off from the outside world by Israel. At least 9 people were reportedly killed and dozens injured when Israeli troops boarded the six-ship Freedom Flotilla convoy in international waters and immediately fired live ammunition at the people on board the ships...

Rwandan Arrest of U.S. Lawyer Motivated by Politics

Posted on May 29, 2010
Professor Peter Erlinder, noted criminal defense lawyer and past president of the National Lawyers Guild, was arrested Friday morning in Rwanda for ?genocide ideology.? Erlinder?s representation of high-profile defendants before the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) has incurred the wrath of government officials, who have charged him with ?negation of the Tutsi genocide? for mounting defenses of his clients that conflict with the government party line about who was responsible for the 1994 genocide...

Kagan?s Troubling Record

Posted on May 14, 2010
After President Obama nominated Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court, he made a statement that implied she would follow in the footsteps of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights giant and first black Supreme Court justice. Kagan served as a law clerk for Marshall shortly after she graduated from Harvard Law School...

Kagan Will Move Supreme Court to the Right

Posted on May 10, 2010
President Barack Obama has chosen Elena Kagan to fill the vacancy left by Justice John Paul Stevens' retirement. Sadly, Kagan cannot fill Justice Stevens' mighty shoes.As the Rehnquist court continued to eviscerate the right of the people to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens filed principled and courageous dissents...

Arizona Legalizes Racial Profiling

Posted on April 27, 2010
The conservative ?states? rights? mantra sweeping our country has led to one of the most egregious wrongs in recent U.S. history. New legislation in Arizona requires law enforcement officers to stop everyone whom they have ?reasonable suspicion? to believe is an undocumented immigrant and arrest them if they fail to produce their papers...

Keeping Same-Sex Marriage in the Dark

Posted on January 15, 2010
On Wednesday, a conservative majority of the Supreme Court overturned a ruling made by a federal trial judge that would have allowed limited television coverage of a trial that will decide the fate of California?s Proposition 8. The trial, which is currently proceeding in San Francisco, is one of the most significant civil rights cases of our time...

Obama's Af-Pak War is Illegal

Posted on December 20, 2009
President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize nine days after he announced he would send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. His escalation of that war is not what the Nobel committee envisioned when it sought to encourage him to make peace, not war.In 1945, in the wake of two wars that claimed millions of lives, the nations of the world created the United Nations system to ?save succeeding generations from the scourge of war...

Lynne Stewart: Casualty of the 'War on Terror'

Posted on November 24, 2009
In a decision that reflects the post-911 terrorism hysteria, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed prominent civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart?s convictions and remanded her case to district court Judge John G. Koeltl to reconsider her sentence...

Richard Falk Delivers Keynote at NLG Convention

Posted on October 27, 2009
On October 15, Professor Richard Falk delivered the keynote address, "Imperial Wars and the Obama Presidency: The Role of Law," at the National Lawyers Guild convention in Seattle. He was introduced by NLG president Marjorie Cohn.

New Film, "Tortured Law," Features Marjorie Cohn

Posted on October 08, 2009
Alliance for Justice has just released a documentary film called ?Tortured Law.? This short film examines the role lawyers played in authorizing torture under the Bush Administration. It features excerpts from Marjorie Cohn?s congressional testimony.

National Lawyers Guild, Other Human Rights Groups Send Open Letter to Eric Holder

Posted on October 08, 2009
Seventeen human rights and civil rights organizations and 45 prominent lawyers and civic leaders have sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder last week urging him to appoint a special independent prosecutor to investigate and prosecute Bush officials and lawyers involved in setting illegal interrogation policies...

"The Legal Avenger," an interview of Marjorie Cohn

Posted on September 26, 2009
Covers illegality of Iraq and Afghanistan wars, prosecuting war crimes, the duty to disobey unlawful orders - See:http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/8498

Legendary Lawyer Doris Brin Walker Dies; Represented Angela Davis, Smith Act Defendants

Posted on August 16, 2009
Doris ?Dobby? Brin Walker, the first woman president of the National Lawyers Guild, died on August 13 at the age of 90. Doris was a brilliant lawyer and a tenacious defender of human rights. The only woman in her University of California Berkeley law school class, Doris defied the odds throughout her life, achieving significant victories for labor, and political activists...

Agent Orange Continues to Poison Vietnam

Posted on June 14, 2009
From 1961 to 1971, the U.S. military sprayed Vietnam with Agent Orange, which contained large quantities of Dioxin, in order to defoliate the trees for military objectives. Dioxin is one of the most dangerous chemicals known to man. It has been recognized by the World Health Organization as a carcinogen (causes cancer) and by the American Academy of Medicine as a teratogen (causes birth defects)...

National Lawyers Guild Calls for Reasoned Analysis of Sotomayor Nomination

Posted on May 30, 2009
New York--In the wake of President Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) encourages a reasoned analysis of Sotomayor's candidacy. Critics are focusing on accusations of judicial activism and identity politics rather than engaging in sound examination of her legal qualifications...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.