The Observer profiles the success of the Innocence Project , which so far has exonerated 260 people!

The NYTimes reports on the efforts of human rights defenders in China to shed some light on the construction of buildings that collapsed in the quake in May 2008. Discussing the fate of advocate Huang Qi, the Times states: “People charged with “illegal possession of state secrets” have little hope of defending themselves in the court system, which operates under Communist Party control. The official definition of secrets is broad and flexible, and can be applied to widely available government documents or even reports published by state-run media. The exact secret involved is rarely revealed.”

One of the issues one may easily forget is the dismissal of several judges in the Bush administration, which ultimately led to the resignation of the  Attorney-General, Gonzalez. As the LATimes reports, the political apointee in charge of supervising the career lawyers in the Justice Department’s civil and voting rights divisions, referred to his staff as “commies,” “crazy libs,” and reportedly confided in a friend that “he hoped to get rid of the “Democrats” and “liberals” because they were “disloyal” and replace them with “real Americans” and “right-thinking Americans.” 

Relieving to read an unrelated story in Slate about the history of Supreme Court Presidents – who preside over the inauguration – and Presidents of the United States. The piece highlights the fact that the Chief Justice who swore in Lincoln, Roger Brooke Taney, stated in Dred Scott v. Sanford that blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Lincoln obviously opposed the decision. Obama and Roberts start out on opposite ground: Obama voted against Chief Justice Roberts.

An interesting piece on the decreasing caseload of the US Supreme Court. Apparently it is ten times easier to get admitted to Harvard than have your case heard by “the nine,” according to Adam Chandler. Curiously, a  timely letter from civil society organizations can sway things towards a writ of certioari – a hearing at the Supreme Court.

Human rights developments in South Korea have been on my personal radar of improvements to watch for a while. Now the NYTimes reports that  a jury system has provisionally been put in place. The first evaluation sounds very promising.

Canadian CBC News reports about concerns over the draft anti-terrorism bill that was introduced in India’s parliament following the attacks in Bombay. Doubling the amount of days of holding terror suspects without filing charges to 180, the bill is also criticised for providing police with a disproportionate leverage in conducting searches. According to the report the home minister sees an adequate balance between human rights protection and the instruments necessary to respond to the “terror.”