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Egypt court orders detention of 24 minority Nubians 15 days
Court Watch |
2017/09/20 10:14
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A lawyer says an Egyptian court has ordered the detention of 24 Nubians for 15 days pending investigation for participating in a protest earlier this month. Nubians are an ethnic minority.
Moustafa el-Hassan says Wednesday's decision comes after prosecutors appealed an earlier decision to release them on bail. Their release, which was ordered on Tuesday, had not been finalized.
They were arrested after setting out on a march in the southern city of Aswan to demand their right to return to their ancestral land around the lake formed by the Aswan High Dam. Charges include illegal protest, receiving funds from foreign sources and blocking public roads.
Nubians trace their roots back to an ancient civilization on the Nile. They have been forcibly displaced four times in the last century.
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Access to license-plate data may be possible, court rules
Court Watch |
2017/09/01 09:01
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It would violate people's privacy to publicly release raw data collected by automated license plate readers that police use to determine whether vehicles are linked to crime, but there may be ways to make the information anonymous that would require it to be disclosed, the California Supreme Court said Thursday.
The ruling came in a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation that sought a week's worth of license plate data — millions of records — from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and Los Angeles Police Department to "understand and educate the public on the risks to privacy posed" by license plate readers in the area.
A unanimous Supreme Court ordered a lower court to consider methods to make the data anonymous and determine whether any of those efforts would require its release.
Jennifer Lehman, assistant county counsel for Los Angeles County, said in a statement that the county was "concerned that even making the information anonymous could pose unique and unintended problems."
She said it would raise those concerns in detail when the case is heard again by the lower court.
A message to the Los Angeles city attorney was not immediately returned.
Law enforcement agencies nationwide are using license plate readers attached to patrol cars and objects such as traffic signals. The devices indiscriminately capture images of license plates that come into view. The information is passed through databases to instantly check whether the car or driver has been linked to crime.
Officials say the scans are useful in tracking stolen vehicles, missing children and people wanted by police. For instance, authorities chasing a suspect in a fatal shooting at Delta State University in Mississippi in 2015 used an automatic license plate reader to track the man as he traveled across state lines.
Privacy advocates say the systems overwhelmingly capture innocent drivers, recording information about their locations that could be used to track their habits and whereabouts. |
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Indiana high court hearing appeal in children's fire deaths
Court News |
2017/09/01 09:01
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The Indiana Supreme Court will hear arguments in the appeal of a man sentenced to death for setting a fire that killed his fiancee's two children.
A Clark County jury convicted 41-year-old Jeffrey Weisheit on murder and arson charges in 2013 for the 2010 deaths of 5-year-old Caleb Lynch and 8-year-old Alyssa Lynch at the family's home near Evansville.
The Supreme Court is to take up his appeal on Sept. 7. Weisheit is arguing he wasn't adequately represented by his defense attorneys during his trial.
Weisheit admitted during the trial that he stuffed a dish towel into Caleb's mouth and used duct tape to pin back the boy's arms before leaving the children alone about 1 a.m. while their mother was at work, but he denied setting the fire. |
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Israeli protesters erect golden statue of High Court chief
Law Blogs |
2017/08/31 09:02
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Jerusalem residents woke to discover a surprising spectacle outside the country's Supreme Court — a golden statue of the court's president put up in protest by members of a religious nationalist group.
Police quickly removed the statue of Miram Naor, raised outside the court overnight, but after questioning some suspects, said no criminal activity had occurred.
Derech Chaim, which wants to impose Jewish religious law in Israel, said it had put up the statue to protest what one activist called the court's "dictatorship." Many Israeli hardliners consider the court to be excessively liberal and interventionist.
Ariel Gruner, a Derech Chaim activist, said the statue was erected in response to a court ruling this week over the country's treatment of African migrants. The ruling said that while Israel can transfer migrants to a third country, it cannot incarcerate them for more than 60 days to pressure them to leave.
The ruling is among a series of decisions that "eliminates the possibility of elected officials, of the government, to make decisions and rule," Gruner said.
He acknowledged that the statue had been inspired by a golden statue of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu erected by a left-wing artist in a main Tel Aviv square last year.
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S. Korean court says worker's rare disease linked to Samsung
Headline Legal News |
2017/08/31 09:02
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South Korea's Supreme Court said a former worker in a Samsung LCD factory who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis should be recognized as having an occupationally caused disease, overturning lower court verdicts that held a lack of evidence against the worker.
In a milestone decision that could aid other sickened tech workers struggling to prove the origin of their diseases, the Supreme Court ruled there was a significant link between Lee Hee-jin's disease and workplace hazards and her working conditions.
Lower courts had denied her claim, partly because no records of her workplace conditions were publicly available. The Labor Ministry and Samsung refused to disclose them when a lower court requested the information, citing trade secrets.
In its ruling Tuesday, the court said the lack of evidence, resulting from Samsung's refusal to provide the information and an inadequate investigation by the government, should not be held against the sickened worker.
Instead, it said, such special circumstances should be considered in favor of the worker.
Lee, 33, began to work at a Samsung LCD factory in Cheonan, south of Seoul, in 2002 when she was a high school senior. She evaluated nearly one hundred display panels per hour on a conveyor belt, looking for defective panels and wiping them with isopropyl alcohol. She worked next to assembly lines that used other chemicals.
Three years after she joined Samsung Electronics, she first reported the symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a rare disease that affects the central nervous system. The average age of reporting multiple sclerosis in South Korea is 38. She left Samsung in 2007.
Lee first filed a claim in 2010 with a government agency, which denied her request for compensation. She took her case to the courts and lost twice before Tuesday's victory. |
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