Pakistan should immediately halt carrying out the death penalty, said the ICJ today after two people were executed in the wake of the horrific attack on a school in Peshawar that killed 149 people, nearly all of them children
Prominent human rights lawyer Dr Amin Mekki Medani, and lawyer and political opposition leader Farouk Abu Issa, remain in detention at an unknown location. The two men were arbitrarily arrested by the Sudanese authorities in early December.
The Nepal government should ensure more victim participation and improve transparency when selecting candidates for two independent commissions on the country’s decade-long conflict, the ICJ and other groups said today.
The ICJ, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and five local human rights and conflict-era victims groups sent an open letter to Prime Minister Sushil Koirala.
The groups, reiterating concerns about the act, said Koirala should narrow the scope of the amnesty powers vested in the commissions and bring them in line with international standards.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Commission on Enforced Disappearances are being established under a 2014 law, the Commission on Investigation of Disappeared Persons, Truth and Reconciliation Act, 2071 (TRC Act).
“A consultative and transparent process for selecting commissioners is critical if the commissions are going to win the trust of conflict-era survivors as well as local and international observers,” the rights groups said in their letter. “The TRC Act is fundamentally flawed, and the government should take these steps to ensure that this important exercise in transitional justice remedies the flaws.”
Contact:
Sam Zarifi, ICJ Asia Pacific Regional Director (Bangkok), t: +66 807819002; email: sam.zarifi(a)icj.org
Nepal-TRCCommission-Advocay-Open Letter-2014-ENG (full text in PDF)
Today’s Opinion by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg on the European Union’s (EU) accession to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is a regrettable setback for human rights in Europe, said Amnesty International, the ICJ and the AIRE Centre.
The arbitrary and unlawful removal of the Chief Justice Ahmed Faiz Hussain (photo) and Supreme Court judge Justice Muthasim Adnan, constitutes an assault on the independence of the judiciary, the ICJ said today.
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