Thursday, Apr 03rd
Last update06:53:29 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
A Maryland judge has formally sentenced Adnan Syed to the time he has already served in prison, appearing to finally bring to a close a long-running case with numerous legal twists and turns that received worldwide attention from the true-crime podcast Serial.
Judge Jennifer Schiffer had already decided that Syed would remain free in a recent written ruling, even though his conviction in the murder of his ex-girlfriend in 1999 when they were in high school still stands.
More than a dozen progressive lawmakers have signed on to a letter demanding the Trump administration release Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil from detention, after he was unlawfully taken by agents for helping lead anti-war student protests on Columbia University’s campus last year.
The administration has been facing growing backlash over Khalil’s arrest, which happened Saturday night as he and his wife were coming back to their university-owned apartment. Plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents took him without a judicial warrant, threatening to revoke his green card that makes him a permanent legal resident.
Khalil’s wife, who earlier made a public plea for her husband’s release, is a U.S. citizen and eight months pregnant with their first child. At the time of his arrest, ICE agents also threatened to arrest Khalil’s wife if she did not leave him and go up to their apartment. Agents would not give her nor their attorney enough information on the officers’ identities and Khalil’s whereabouts.
“Israel’s decision to cut off electricity to Gaza’s main operational desalination plant, a week after it halted the entry of all humanitarian aid and commercial supplies, including fuel and food, violates international humanitarian law and is further evidence of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip.
“These inhumane and unlawful actions are a clear indication that Israel is continuing its policy of deliberately imposing on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction – an act prohibited under the Genocide Convention. They are also a reminder of the control Israel has as occupying power, allowing it to turn life-critical services on and off at any given point.
A prominent Palestinian activist who helped lead Columbia University’s student encampment movement was arrested on Saturday night by federal immigration authorities who claimed they were acting on a state department order to revoke his green card, according to his attorney.
Mahmoud Khalil was at his university-owned apartment, blocks from the private Ivy League university’s main campus in New York when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents entered the building and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told the Associated Press.
Israel cut off the electricity supply to Gaza, officials said Sunday, affecting a desalination plant producing drinking water for part of the arid territory. Hamas called it part of Israel’s “starvation policy.”
Israel last week suspended supplies of goods to the territory of more than 2 million Palestinians, an echo of the siege it imposed in the earliest days of the war.
Israel is pressing the militant group to accept an extension of the first phase of their ceasefire. That phase ended last weekend. Israel wants Hamas to release half of the remaining hostages in return for a promise to negotiate a lasting truce.
Republican lawmakers in Montana voted en masse to help defeat two extreme anti-trans bills in an unprecedented move on Thursday, after powerful speeches from two trans representatives imploring them to reject the latest intent to criminalize gender nonconformity.
State representative Zooey Zephyr spoke out against a bill that sought to ban drag performances and Pride parades in Montana, introduced by a Republican member of of the house who has referred to transgenderism as a “fetish based on crossdressing”.
Members of Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) unit were barred from entering a small, independent federal agency promoting economic development in Africa on Wednesday after a tense standoff with federal staff they had been sent to fire.
Workers at the US African Development Foundation (USADF), which Donald Trump has ordered to be closed, refused to allow Doge operatives to enter after they arrived at its Washington headquarters on Wednesday afternoon. But the Doge team returned on Thursday, accompanied by agents with the US Marshals Service and Peter Marocco, the acting director of the now-shuttered US Agency for International Development, according to a government official familiar with the situation. This time, they were able to gain access to the building, the official said, and no staff was present.
Scores of legal challenges have been lodged against the sweeping project to upend the government bureaucracy, producing a spate of court rulings declaring the halting of aid illegal and ordering the reinstatement of fired federal workers.
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