Small Bits: Iran annoyed, Academic Publishing, Immigration law, Iraqi Justice
- Iran seems to be annoyed that Canada is engaged in a minimal attempt to find out who murdered Zahra Kazemi, and see that they’re brought to justice.
- It seems that more and more academics are getting the word: Access to your research is good. I wonder when the computer scientists at IEEE and ACM will hear about the Internet publishing movement?
- Ex-Berliner has a post about Americans in Berlin, running afoul of the new immigration and labor laws. (Via The Periscope, who has an excerpt.)
- Findlaw is running an article on the new Iraqi legal system, “Dim Prospects for Justice in Iraq
:”Yet, viewed as a whole, the statute and rules of the Iraqi Special Tribunal have serious flaws. First, neither the statute nor the rules specifically require that guilt be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, a basic standard of international human rights law. Second, the tribunal allows for trials in absentia, compromising the right to a defense.
Third, and importantly, both the right to counsel and the right to remain silent are not granted to the defendant at a sufficiently early stage in the legal process to ensure fair proceedings. Indeed, the “high value detainees” arraigned in July 2004 did not have counsel present at their court appearances. Although it is unclear when they were finally allowed to meet with their lawyers, they appear to have been made to wait many months after their initial detentions.