Report of the 1st meeting of the EU Committee of Experts on Impunity

Under the authority of the Steering Committee for Human Rights (CDDH), the Committee is instructed to study the feasibility of guidelines against impunity for human rights violations and if considered appropriate, prepare a set of guidelines, drawing on inter alia, the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights, and the work of the European [...]

New try to transfer Guantanamo detainees to the U.S.

Democratic negotiators from the House and Senate included a measure in a $42.8 billion bill that would fund the Homeland Security Department for the current fiscal year. Under the measure, the administration would be required to present a risk assessment and give 14 days’ notice before bringing any of the 223 detainees remaining in the [...]

ECtHR Grand chamber judgment in Varnava and Others v. Turkey

The applications were introduced before the Court in the name and on behalf of 18 Cypriot nationals, nine of whom had disappeared during military operations carried out by the Turkish Army in northern Cyprus in July and August 1974. The nine other applicants are or were relatives of the men who disappeared.The applicants alleged that [...]

Salahuddin Amin goes to European Court for UK complicity in torture case

Amin says he was questioned 11 times by MI5 officers during the 10 months he spent in the unlawful detention of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), who had detained him at the request of the British. After his eventual deportation to the UK, he and four other men were convicted of conspiring to mount [...]

Report: Terrorism in the West 2008

The Foundation for defense of democracies has just issued its report ‘Terrorism in the West’, describing terrorist events and landmark legal cases in the West in 2008. Read the report here.

Chechnya, enforced disappearances and the European Court of Human Rights

New article in Harvard Human Rights Journal here.

Pukhigova v. Russia

The European Court of Human Rights issued its judgment on July 2, 2009 in a disappearance case that took place in the Chechen Republic, unanimously holding that Russia violated Article 2 (right to life), Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment), Article 5 (right to liberty and security), and Article 13 (right of an [...]

ECHR judgment on interception of communications in Kvasnica v. Slovakia

The European Court of Human Rights has today notified in writing its Chamber judgment in the case of Kvasnica v. Slovakia (application no. 72094/01). The case concerned the interception of Mr Kvasnica’s professional telephone communications in the context of a criminal investigation into the financial activities of a group of companies for which he acted [...]

European Court of Human Rights rules case on access to information in Kenedi v. Hungary

The applicant alleged that the Hungarian authorities’ protracted reluctance to grant him unrestricted access to certain documents, authorised by a court order, had prevented him from terminating a professional undertaking, namely, to write an objective study on the functioning of the Hungarian State Security Service in the 1960s. He had been unable to have the [...]

Council of Europe Commitee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights calls on Obama to hold perpetrators of torture accountable

Read the working document by Mrs. Herta Däubler-Gmelin for the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, entitled: The state of human rights in Europe: the need to eradicate impunity here.
In passing she says the following on the release of the torture memo’s:
I should like to commend the new US President for [...]