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GENEVA (AP) — The United Nations human rights office says U.S. death row inmate Clayton Lockett's suffering during his botched Oklahoma execution this week may amount to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international human rights law. A spokesman for the office, Rupert Colville, says Lockett's prolonged death on Tuesday is "the second case of apparent extreme suffering caused by malfunctioning lethal injections" reported in the United States this year, after Dennis McGuire's execution in Ohio on Jan. 16 with an allegedly untested combination of drugs. Colville told reporters Friday in Geneva that "the apparent cruelty involved in these recent...

Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Tuesday that Russia’s absorption of Ukraine’s Crimea region after a secession referendum and declaration of independence there violated international law. […] Merkel stressed that international organizations including the United Nations, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe shared that view. …

“There has been no greater advance than this, gentlemen,” the President of the United States said. “It is a definite guarantee of peace. It is a definite guarantee by word against aggression.” The year was 1919. The speaker was President Woodrow Wilson and the tremendous advance in human history was the League of Nations.Then Japan seized Manchuria and turned it into a puppet regime. China turned to the League of Nations which ordered Japan to withdraw from Manchuria. Japan instead withdrew from the League of Nations. Five years later, Japan invaded China. China asked for help from the League of...

This study from the Hudson Institute has wider implications beyond the current debate over amnesty. It places the blame for its findings on a failure of patriotism. A country whose educational institutions are less patriotic and more liberal will play a crucial role in the shaping of a less patriotic and more liberal population. Immigrants who tend to get their identity more from education than national culture (tellingly immigrants are more likely to rank professors higher than soldiers, in contrast to native-born Americans) are more likely to lean left. For example the study finds that immigrants are more likely to...

American gun rights advocates said Thursday that they remain determined to block a far-reaching U.S. agreement on international arms sales, warning that the pact could lead to a national firearms registry and disrupt the U.S. gun market, even as the accord ran into an unexpected last-minute snag in negotiations in New York. In its budget debate last weekend, the Senate approved a nonbinding amendment opposing the treaty offered by Sen. James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican, with eight Democrats joining all 45 Republicans backing the amendment. Despite the Senate vote, numerous groups have pressured Mr. Obama to support the treaty. Amnesty...

The NAACP is taking to the U.N. its effort to ensure that all former convicted felons in the United States can vote. A delegation from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was holding meetings Tuesday at the United Nation's Geneva office in part to press the world body to send observers to the U.S. for this year's elections. The diplomatic push comes against the backdrop of a related — and vigorous — debate about requirements in some states for would-be voters to provide proper identification before they can cast ballots. The NAACP says nearly 6 million U.S....

Twitchy headline says it all.Context provided by Erick Erickson at Red State: In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly today the President of the United States declared that the future does not belong to practicing Christians. Already, the media and the left are in full denial, probably based on their general lack of understanding of theology. This would have been a gaffe had Mitt Romney said it. But with Barack Obama, he’s just speaking bold truths. His bold truth declares that the future does not belong to practicing Christians. Pay careful attention to what he says: "The future...

Christian minister accused of “Crime against Humanity” Scott Lively targeted by an international homosexualist plot By Julio Severo Two years ago, Scott Lively, author of “The Pink Swastika”, addressed members of the Ugandan Parliament, which was considering a bill criminalizing homosexuality. Lively urged an emphasis on therapy rather than punishment, and, after the bill was released he opposed the death penalty provision. Scott Lively: accused of “Crime against Humanity” Now, on March 14th a lawsuit was filed in an American court alleging that Lively committed the “Crime Against Humanity,” by speaking against homosexuality in Uganda. The plaintiffs say that his...

The scene could hardly have been more bizarre: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's motorcade was pelted with rotten tomatoes and shoes as she was being driven to the opening of a U.S. Consulate General in the ancient Egyptian city of Alexandria....Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's ostensible reason for being in Alexandria was to take part in the flag-raising ceremony for our Consulate General. This is a disgrace. Alexandria was once home to a flourishing Jewish community. Jews flourish there no more. Her symbolic presence there embodies everything wrong about this administration's foreign policy. Until recently, it was hard to...

Retired Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levy, who heads a committee tasked with examining the legality of Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, declared on Tuesday that Israelis have a legal right to settle the region. "According to international law, Israelis have a legal right to settle all of Judea and Samaria, at the very least the lands that Israel controls under agreements with the Palestinian Authority. Therefore, the establishment of Jewish settlements [in Judea and Samaria] is, in itself, not illegal." The committee was established by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in efforts to determine and cement the legal status of...

Want the United States to gain legal access to the vast amount of oil and natural gas in the underwater Extended Continental Shelf? Get LOST. Specifically, the U.S. Convention on the Law of the Sea, which often goes by the acronym LOST. The Obama administration wants the Senate to act on the treaty, which has been around since 1982. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) recently held a hearing to make the case for LOST. According to its advocates, we need LOST for a variety of reasons. One of them concerns the oil and gas resources located in the outer limits of...

This Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases that should interest every U.S. company doing business overseas, and especially those operating in the developing world. Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co. and Mohamed v. Palestinian Authority raise the issue of whether corporations can be sued for violations of international law under U.S. statutes, including the Alien Tort Statute. The ATS was adopted in 1789 by the first U.S. Congress. The statute permits suits by aliens in federal courts for certain alleged international-law violations, but it was moribund for nearly 200 years and its purpose remains opaque. The...

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton are entering negotiations over — or seeking ratification of — five treaties that could radically limit our national sovereignty and the reach of our democratic institutions. Particularly scary is that the treaties, once signed and ratified, have the same status as constitutional law and cannot be altered or eclipsed by Congress or state legislatures. And their provisions must be enforced by U.S. courts. Those who wish to preserve our sovereignty and democratic control over our future must rally to block these treaties, either by pressing Obama and

A US federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit seeking to hold Rio Tinto responsible for human rights violations and thousands of deaths linked to a Bougainville copper and gold mine it once ran. The appeals court has returned the case to US District Judge Margaret Morrow in Los Angeles for further proceedings. But some dissenting judges protested against allowing a lawsuit to proceed in federal courts brought by non-US residents against non-US companies such as Rio Tinto, which has corporate offices in the UK and Australia. The case is one of several in which non-US residents seek to hold...

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay accused the United States of breaking international law when Texas executed Mexican citizen Humberto Leal Garcia Jr. Thursday night. The execution sparked controversy after the International Court of Justice in the Hague determined in 2004 that the U.S. had violated the Vienna Convention when officials failed to tell foreign inmates about their right to visit their consular officials. But the U.S. Supreme Court voted yesterday that Texas could go ahead with the execution, even over the objection of President Barack Obama. Pillay said today the execution "raises particular legal concerns" about the...

An illegal immigrant has no right to free medical intervention or ongoing health care under the Charter of Rights, the Federal Court of Appeal has ruled in a precedent-setting decision.

Amnesty International today asked the US and Pakistani authorities to clarify aspects of the operation in Abbottabad in which Osama bin Laden was killed. The organization specifically requested information on the status and whereabouts of those who were with bin Laden and the circumstances of his killing. “We are seeking information from the US and Pakistani authorities about how many people were in the compound at the time of the operation, what happened to them and specifically what is the status and current whereabouts of the survivors,” said Claudio Cordone, Senior Director at Amnesty International. According to reports attributed to...

Since the death of Osama bin Laden Sunday, administration officials have repeatedly said that the mission to kill him complied with domestic and international law. "Let me make something very clear," Attorney General Eric Holder told Congress on Wednesday, "the operation in which Osama bin Laden was killed was lawful. He was the head of al Qaeda, an organization that conducted the attacks of Sept. 11. He admitted his involvement." But as new details of the operation emerge, and some Pakistani leaders protest the U.S. incursion into their state, legal experts say the administration must more forcefully lay out its...

Obama doesn’t tell you what he’s thinking. He keeps his motives to himself. Cherished long-term ideological goals are advanced as pragmatic fixes to concrete problems in the present. Now we’re seeing the familiar domestic pattern in foreign policy as well. Few Americans realize that Obama has had a longstanding interest in multilateral efforts to combat war crimes and genocide. Obama would like to see a more constraining international legal regime on war crimes, even at the cost of national sovereignty, not to mention the blood and treasure of the countries doing the enforcing. In general, Obama has said little about...

The war declared on struggling middle class taxpayers by greedy Public Union bosses has escalated now to the point that supporters of raping more tax dollars from an impoverished middle class have turned to “International Law,” once again ignoring America’s sovereignty and our constitution, placing United Nations mandates in their place. Ordinarily I’d ignore such efforts to circumvent our sovereignty and rely instead on our own constitution, but since greedy public union bosses and those they have misled wish to take this avenue, I’ll play along. They may not like that too much, though. I first saw this tactic of...