The Commonwealth Summit, a biennial meeting of heads of state of British Commonwealth nations, ended its weekend meeting in Perth Australia with no decision on a new mechanism for addressing human rights abuses in member nations. The human rights controversy has arisen around a cluster of issues including the continuing existence of criminal and other [...]
From the NY Times: Thousands of sexual assaults that occur in the United States every year are not reflected in the federal government’s yearly crime report because the report uses an archaic definition of rape that is far narrower than the definitions used by most police departments… Many law enforcement officials and advocates for women [...]
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that agitation is afoot in that state about the law criminalizing cohabitation between unmarried men and women, plus a criminal ban on adultery. (Doubtless the adultery law, too, has been historically limited to different-sex couples. But if a gay couple marries in New York, moves to Florida and hanky-panky begins…) According [...]
The Swiss Justice Department has announced a proposed reform of the Swiss criminal code, including repeal of Article 271, the provision that criminalizes sexual relations between parent and child or between siblings. The Department is scheduled to issue a report making the argument for the proposal this spring, but in the meantime, this one item [...]
From Xtra British Columbia's Supreme Court chief justice has reserved his decision on a request by a Canadian polyamory group for the government to declare whether it will treat polyamory as criminal activity under the polygamy statute. Persons convicted of polygamy face up to five years in prison. [Note: the British Columbia Supreme Court is a [...]
From the NY Review of Books: A new report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) provides grim reaffirmation of something we already knew: sexual violence is epidemic within our country’s prisons and jails. According to the report, 64,500 of the inmates who were in a state or federal prison on the day the latest [...]