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Prominent human rights attorney quits over failure to prosecute Venezuela
Legal Interview |
2025/01/14 09:50
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A prominent human rights attorney has quietly parted ways with the International Criminal Court to protest what he sees as an unjustified failure of its chief prosecutor to indict members of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ’s government for crimes against humanity, The Associated Press has learned.
The Chilean-born Claudio Grossman, a former law school dean at American University in Washington and past president of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, was appointed special adviser to ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan in November 2021. In that unpaid position, he advised Khan on the deteriorating human rights situation in Venezuela.
In a harshly worded email last month to Khan, Grossman said his ethical standards no longer allow him to stand by silently as Maduro’s government continues to commit abuses, expel foreign diplomats and obstruct the work of human rights monitors from the United Nations ? without any action from the ICC.
“I can no longer justify the choice not to take correspondingly serious action against the perpetrators of the grave violations,” Grossman wrote in an email rejecting an offer by Khan’s office in September to renew his contract.
A copy of the email, which has not been made public, was provided to the AP by someone familiar with the ICC investigation into Venezuela. A phone call by Khan asking Grossman to reconsider also failed, according to the person on the condition of anonymity to discuss the politically sensitive investigation.
Following AP’s inquiries with Khan’s office, Grossman’s name was removed from the court’s website listing him as a special adviser.
“The Prosecutor is extremely grateful to Professor Grossman for the expertise and work he has rendered,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement without addressing Grossman’s stated reasons for cutting ties with the court based in The Hague, Netherlands. Grossman declined to comment.
The pressure on Khan to indict Venezuelan officials, including Maduro himself, comes as he battles allegations of misconduct with a female aide and the threat of U.S. sanctions over his decision to seek the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for alleged war crimes in Gaza.
The Rome Statute that established the court took effect in 2002, with a mandate to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide ? but only when domestic courts fail to initiate their own investigations.
Calls for faster progress in the court’s only ever investigation in Latin America have grown louder as Maduro tightens his grip on power, preparing to be sworn in for a third term Jan. 10 following an election marred by serious allegations of ballot box fraud and a post-election crackdown. More than 2,000 people were arrested and 20 killed following the vote.
The U.S. and even some fellow leftist leaders in Latin America have demanded authorities present voting records, as they have in the past, to refute tally sheets presented by Maduro’s opponents showing their candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez, prevailed by a two-to-one margin.
Many in Venezuela’s opposition have complained that the ICC is applying a double standard, moving aggressively to seek the arrest of Netanyahu and Russia’s Vladimir Putin for atrocities in Gaza and Ukraine while showing undue leniency with Venezuelan officials Khan has been investigating for more than three years.
“There is no justification whatsoever for the inaction,” Gonzalez and opposition leader Maria Corina Machado wrote in a recent letter to Grossman and 18 other special advisers to the court appealing for their help.
“What is at stake is the life and well-being of Venezuelans,” they added in the letter, which was also provided to the AP by the person familiar with the ICC investigation. “This unjustifiable delay will cast legitimate doubts about the integrity of a system of accountability that has been an aspiration for the whole world.”
At the request of several Latin American governments, Khan three years ago opened an investigation into Venezuelan security forces’ jailing, torture and killing of anti-government demonstrators. At the same time, he promised technical assistance to give local authorities an opportunity to take action before the ICC, a tribunal of last resort.
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TikTok asks Supreme Court to temporarily block law that could ban site in U.S.
Legal Interview |
2024/12/16 06:20
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TikTok on Monday asked the Supreme Court to step in on an emergency basis to block the federal law that would ban the popular platform in the United States unless its China-based parent company agreed to sell it.
Lawyers for the company and China-based ByteDance urged the justices to step in before the law’s Jan. 19 deadline. A similar plea was filed by content creators who rely on the platform for income and some of TikTok’s more than 170 million users in the U.S.
“A modest delay in enforcing the Act will create breathing room for this Court to conduct an orderly review and the new Administration to evaluate this matter — before this vital channel for Americans to communicate with their fellow citizens and the world is closed,” lawyers for the companies told the Supreme Court.
President-elect Donald Trump, who once supported a ban but then pledged during the campaign to “save TikTok,” said his administration would take a look at the situation.
“As you know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” Trump said during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. His campaign saw the platform as a way to reach younger, less politically engaged voters.
Trump was meeting with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, according to two people familiar with the president-elect’s plans who were not authorized to speak publicly about them and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The companies have said that a shutdown lasting just a month would cause TikTok to lose about a third of its daily users in the U.S. and significant advertising revenue.
The case could attract the court’s interest because it pits free speech rights against the government’s stated aims of protecting national security, while raising novel issues about social media platforms.
The request first goes to Chief Justice John Roberts, who oversees emergency appeals from courts in the nation’s capital. He almost certainly will seek input from all nine justices.
On Friday, a panel of federal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied an emergency plea to block the law, a procedural ruling that allowed the case to move to the Supreme Court.
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PA high court orders counties not to count disputed ballots in US Senate race
Legal Interview |
2024/11/20 15:42
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Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court on Monday weighed in on a flashpoint amid ongoing vote counting in the U.S. Senate election between Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and Republican David McCormick, ordering counties not to count mail-in ballots that lack a correct handwritten date on the return envelope.
The order is a win for McCormick and a loss for Casey as the campaigns prepare for a statewide recount and press counties for favorable ballot-counting decisions while election workers are sorting through thousands of provisional ballots.
McCormick’s campaign called it a “massive setback” for Casey.
The Democratic-majority high court’s order reiterates the position it took previously that the ballots shouldn’t be counted in the election, a decision that Republicans say several Democratic-controlled counties nevertheless challenged.
In a statement, Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said a lack of legal clarity had surrounded the ballots, putting county officials in a position where they were “damned if they did and damned if they didn’t — likely facing legal action no matter which decision they made on counting.”
It comes amid a gust of fresh litigation in recent days filed by both campaigns, contesting the decisions of about a dozen counties over whether or not to count thousands of provisional ballots.
Casey’s campaign says the provisional ballots shouldn’t be rejected for garden-variety errors, like a polling place worker forgetting to sign it. Republicans say the law is clear that the ballots must be discarded.
The Associated Press called the race for McCormick last week, concluding that not enough ballots remained to be counted in areas Casey was winning for him to take the lead.
As of Monday, McCormick led by about 17,000 votes out of almost 7 million ballots counted — inside the 0.5% margin threshold to trigger an automatic statewide recount under Pennsylvania law.
Statewide, the number of mail-in ballots with wrong or missing dates on the return envelope could be in the thousands.
Republicans last week asked the court to bar counties from counting the ballots, saying those decisions violate both the court’s recent orders and its precedent in upholding the requirement in state law that a voter write the date on their mail-in ballot’s return envelope. |
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Google faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly
Legal Interview |
2024/09/06 08:27
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One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.
The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends in court papers.
They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side.
“It’s worth saying the quiet part out loud,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement. “One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here.”
Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock to reach audiences.
In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn likened the government’s case to a “time capsule with with a Blackberry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card.”
Dunn said Supreme Court precedents warn judges about “the serious risk of error or unintended consequences” when dealing with rapidly emerging technology and considering whether antitrust law requires intervention. She also warned that any action taken against Google won’t benefit small businesses but will simply allow other tech behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok to fill the void.
According to Google’s annual reports, revenue has actually declined in recent years for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023,
The trial that began Monday in Alexandria, Virginia, over the alleged ad tech monopoly was initially going to be a jury trial, but Google maneuvered to force a bench trial, writing a check to the federal government for more than $2 million to moot the only claim brought by the government that required a jury.
The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who was appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton and is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including that of Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.
The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine, which generates the majority of the company’s $307 billion in annual revenue. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets. |
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The Supreme Court strips the SEC of a critical enforcement tool in fraud cases
Legal Interview |
2024/07/02 10:44
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The Supreme Court on Thursday stripped the Securities and Exchange Commission of a major tool in fighting securities fraud in a decision that also could have far-reaching effects on other regulatory agencies.
The justices ruled in a 6-3 vote that people accused of fraud by the SEC, which regulates securities markets, have the right to a jury trial in federal court. The in-house proceedings the SEC has used in some civil fraud complaints, including against Houston hedge fund manager George Jarkesy, violate the Constitution, the court said.
“A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court’s conservative majority.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who read from her dissent in the courtroom, said that “litigants who seek to dismantle the administrative state” would rejoice in the decision.
Federal agencies that oversee safety in mines and other workplaces are among many that can only impose civil penalties in in-house, administrative proceedings, Sotomayor wrote, joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
“For those and countless other agencies, all the majority can say is tough luck; get a new statute from Congress,” she wrote.
The case is among several this term in which conservative and business interests are urging the nine-member court to constrict federal regulators. The court’s six conservatives already have done so, including in a decision last year that sharply limited environmental regulators’ ability to police water pollution in wetlands.
Still awaiting decision are cases calling on the court to overturn the 40-year-old ruling colloquially known as Chevron, which has made it easier to sustain regulation of the environment, public, health, worker safety and consumer protection. Some of the same parties that supported Jarkesy at the Supreme Court are calling for Chevron to be overturned.
The SEC was awarded more than $5 billion in civil penalties in the 2023 government spending year that ended Sept. 30, the agency said in a news release. It was unclear how much of that money came through in-house proceedings or lawsuits in federal court.
The agency had already reduced the number of cases it brings in administrative proceedings pending the Supreme Court’s resolution of the case.
The high court rejected arguments advanced by President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration that relied on a 50-year-old decision in which the court ruled that in-house proceedings did not violate the Constitution’s right to a jury trial in civil lawsuits.
The justices ruled in favor of Jarkesy after the SEC appealed a decision in which the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out stiff financial penalties against Jarkesy and his Patriot28 investment adviser.
The appeals court found that the SEC’s case against Jarkesy, resulting in a $300,000 civil fine and the repayment of $680,000 in allegedly ill-gotten gains, should have been heard in a federal court instead of before one of the SEC’s administrative law judges. |
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Court grapples with details on school shooter that were leaked to media
Legal Interview |
2024/06/17 15:33
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A media organization is due in court Monday after publishing details from leaked documents about the shooter who killed six people at a Nashville elementary school in March 2023, while the outlet sues for those records and others to be released to the public.
The hearing, ordered by Nashville Chancellor I’Ashea Myles, has led to outcry not only from Star News Digital Media and Editor-in-Chief Michael Leahy, but also from open government advocates and Tennessee lawmakers.
Leahy’s attorney argued the court proceeding would violate his due process rights and infringe on First Amendment protections after his outlet, The Tennessee Star, reported on records leaked to them about the shooter at The Covenant School.
Initially, the judge ordered Leahy and attorneys to explain in court why the recent work involving leaked documents has not violated court protection of records that could subject them to contempt proceedings and sanctions. The judge later denied a request by Leahy to cancel the hearing but said no witnesses would testify.
The public records lawsuit by the conservative Star News and other plaintiffs remains tied up in court after more than a year. A group of Covenant School parents have joined the lawsuit, arguing none of the documents should ever be released because they could inspire copycats and retraumatize their children.
Though the investigative file remains officially closed to the public’s view, two prominent rounds of evidence about the shooter’s writings have leaked to media outlets.
Police have said they could not determine who was responsible for the first leak. While they look into the second, a lieutenant has drawn a connection to a former colleague without directly accusing him of the leak.
In a court declaration Friday, Nashville Police Lt. Alfredo Arevalo said his office led an investigation of the first leak. A former lieutenant, Garet Davidson, was given a copy of the criminal investigative file that was stored in a safe in his office and only Davidson had the key and safe combination, Arevalo said.
Davidson has left the force. Separately, he filed a well-publicized complaint alleging the police department actively lobbied to gut the city’s community oversight board, as well as a number of other misconduct claims.
In his declaration, Arevalo noted Davidson has spoken about details from the Covenant investigative file on Leahy’s radio show and another program.
Arevalo wrote that he is “appalled” by the leak and “saddened by the impact that this leak must have on the victims and families of the Covenant school shooting.”
The shooter who killed three 9-year-old children and three adults at Covenant, a private Christian school, left behind at least 20 journals, a suicide note and an unpublished memoir, according to court filings.
The city of Nashville has argued it doesn’t have to release the documents during an active police investigation. The plaintiffs have countered there is no meaningful criminal investigation underway since the shooter, Audrey Hale, was killed by police. |
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