A Malaysian model, who was set to become the first woman to be caned in the southeast Asian country for drinking beer in public, had her sentence postponed Monday until the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. An Islamic, or sharia, court in Pahang had fined Kartika — a Muslim — $1,400 (5,000 Malaysian ringgit) and sentenced her to six strokes with a rattan cane for drinking at a hotel bar two years ago.

The caning would have been carried out within seven days of that, making her the first woman to be caned in Malaysia under sharia law. The moderate Muslim country has a dual-track justice system, in which Islamic courts operate alongside civil courts. But the country’s civil system also cannot overrule a sharia court sentence.

Such a punishment, caning, for drinking alcohol, seems very harsh. Further, the fact that a country’s civil courts cannot over-rule a religious court seems even stranger.

For the past several years, there has been a debate stoked by AIDS campaigners and gay rights groups about revoking this section of the penal code (it was introduced by the British in British ruled India in 1861, and is no longer prevalent in the Britain of today). However, attempts by the Government to do a debate on removing this section of the penal code runs aground due to opposition by religious groups (and there are enough people in each religious group to be outraged by the thought of homosexuality), so it would have seemed difficult by the Government to move fast on such a law. And then came this stunning judgment by the Delhi High Court (and interestingly, it uses the same argument as used by several US state courts, using the theory that such laws are violative of many of the equality and fundamental rights of citizens) (link to target):

In a breakthrough judgment, the Delhi High Court on Thursday legalised gay sex among consenting adults holding that the law making it a criminal offence violates fundamental rights. “We declare section 377 of IPC in so far as it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private is violative of Articles 14, 21 and 15 of the Constitution,” a Bench comprising Chief Justice A P Shah and Justice S Murlidhar said.
It further said that this judgement will hold till Parliament chooses to amend the law. “In our view Indian Constitutional Law does not permit the statutory criminal law to be held captive by the popular misconception of who the LGBTs (lesbian gay bisexual transgender) are. “It cannot be forgotten that discrimination is antithesis of equality and that it is the recognition of equality which will foster dignity of every individual,” the Bench said in its 105-page judgement.

It is pretty much sure that there will be appeals to the Supreme Court by many sections of society, one only hopes that the Government will not try to get this judgment over-turned. At the same time, this is a judgment by the Delhi High Court, and is applicable in the capital city (even though it is a precedent that can be used by organizations all over the country); ultimately it is either the judgment of the Supreme Court or a law passed by Parliament that can ensure coverage across the entire country.

Arlan found a stable job working for a construction company. Noriko grew up Japanese, attending school and never learning her parents’ native language. Noriko, like many Tokyo girls her age, loves hip-hop and hopes to be a dancer or a teacher at a dance school someday. But her future in the only country she’s ever known went into limbo when Japanese immigration authorities arrested her mother in 2006.
Japan’s Immigration Bureau in a statement to CNN said the couple’s illegal presence in the country as an “extremely malicious” violation that “shakes the foundation of Japan’s immigration control.” But when it came to 13 year old Noriko, the government gave the girl a choice: Her country or her parents. “Japan is my homeland,” says Noriko, when asked why she is choosing to stay behind. She will move in with an aunt, allowed to stay in Japan under a visa that the government will reassess yearly. Her life, say her parents, will be better in Japan. She’ll have schooling and the dreams a big city like Tokyo can offer her, versus the impoverished farm community her parents will move back to in the Philippines.

However heart-breaking the story, this is not a story that happens rarely. Such scenes are repeated in Japan and many other countries on a regular basis. Some countries are more liberal, allowing people to see a path for becoming citizens when they have been in the country for a long time; in other cases, it is equally traumatic when the child gets automatic citizenship due to having been born there, while the parents get no such benefit and are deported back to their original countries.
One slight twist happens in some such cases when the families do not retain any papers of their original country’s citizenship, and their original country refuses to take them, asking for proof that these people were indeed their citizens in the first place.

Once the Obama Administration came to power, the expectation was that many of the excesses of the Bush era would come to a stop; however, if you look at the policy position of Obama once in power, he has dumped the term of ‘enemy combatant’ but kept the same powers (almost) (refer this article):

There will no longer will be “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the Obama administration said Friday. Moreover, the new president no longer claims that his title as commander in chief allows him to order people deemed to be dangerous captured and held without trial. Having abandoned a favored Bush administration term in the war on terrorism, however, the new administration has claimed roughly the same power to hold Guantanamo’s detainees indefinitely — even those who never held a gun or went near a battlefield.
President Obama’s lawyers said Congress gave him the authority he needed when it authorized the use of military force one week after the Sept. 11 attacks. It said the president can use the military against “nations, organizations or persons” who planned or aided the terrorist attacks. President George W. Bush cited the same authority when he created the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, but he also said he could act on his own as commander in chief.

For people who had been hoping that the change in administration will lead to a total reversal of policies, the enunciation of the new policy would not have been very comforting. One factor that would have led to the policy not being as liberal as many would have liked was the statistic released recently about the new of people who were released from Guantanamo who went back to being terrorists and fighting US interests.

- Pakistan is facing an incredible movement by the terrorists and Islamic fanatics to take over increasingly large sections of the country and bring these regions under their influence. This is a violent campaign that is very brutal, and which the army and the political leadership are unwilling to fully face (and supposedly because the army is unwilling to abandon the religious warriors, seeing them as an instrument that can help shape the strategic aims of Pakistan in Afghanistan and Kashmir). The takeover by the Taliban of the Swat valley is still unfolding before the international community, and everybody is still shocked.
- After the latest terror attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team, Pakistan is now thoroughly dubbed as a very unsafe place, and all sort of tourism and foreign interest is now off.
- The traditional tensions between the 3 power centers, the Army Chief, the President and the Prime Minister are again escalating. Gilani, the Prime Minister, is trying to make political space for himself by aligning with the interests of the army and moving away from Zardari. Army chief Kayani in turn is starting to make his pressure public now, with increasing reports about warning the politicians to settle things down
- The tussle between Zardari and Sharif is the biggest problem. These 2 had made an uneasy truce and alliance when they wanted to bring down General Musharraf, but then separated soon after (and they have a long history of animosity – Zardari after all spent about a decade in jail during Sharif’s rule)
- The US and other western countries want the country to be focused on fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, and have a great deal of influence and are not wanting in exercising authority. Hence, constant use of missiles from drones that attack inside Pakistan even though it is unpopular in Pakistan, and using their influence to try to arrange political deals inside Pakistan (to the extent that no politician can be truly anti-American and be a strong leader)
In these times, this tension between Zardari and Nawaz Sharif is a truly dangerous escalation of the political conflict, and one that can only lead to a worsening of the situation.

The United States has sent detainees back to different countries for legal processes in their countries, but given the history of China’s efforts against separatism in its Xinjiang province, there is a huge amount of belief that these detainees will be tortured if they are sent to China.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday temporarily blocked a judge’s decision to immediately free 17 Chinese Muslims at Guantanamo Bay into the U.S. In a one-page order, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued the emergency stay at the request of the Bush administration. The three-judge panel said it would postpone release of the detainees for at least another week to give the government more time to make arguments in the case. The appeals court set a deadline of next Thursday for additional filings but it is up to the judges to decide how quickly to act afterward.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration said it was continuing “heightened” efforts to find another country to accept the Uighurs, since the detainees might be tortured if they are turned over to China. “There are extensive efforts. We oppose the idea of their release here,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. The Justice Department criticized Urbina’s decision as undercutting immigration laws that dictate how foreigners should be brought into the country. It also cited security concerns over weapons training the Uighurs received at camps in Afghanistan. Such a potential security risk outweighs the inconvenience the detainees might suffer in waiting a while longer at Guantanamo, government lawyers contended.

In effect, since the detainees are not being accepted by any other country, and will not be sent to China, they have remained in prison for the last 4 years (after a determination that they can be released). The United States is also not willing to let them come into the country (from Guantanamo Bay where they are currently houses). A mighty complex issue.

Thailand’s Constitutional Court is set to decide later Tuesday whether Samak violated the constitution by taking money from a private company to host the “Tasting and Grumbling” cooking show. If found guilty, he and his cabinet would be forced to resign — something that protesters occupying the grounds of his offices have not been able to achieve since storming his Government House two weeks ago. However, Samak would not be barred from holding office, and his deputy has already held out the possibility that the ruling coalition could simply vote him back as prime minister.
The protesters, who call themselves the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), are pushing a broader agenda than just Samak’s resignation. They want to curtail Thailand’s democracy so that only 30 percent of seats in parliament would be elected, which they say would restrict the influence of poor rural voters in places like Udon Thani, who have widely supported Samak. PAD supporters say the change would ensure that Samak’s allies cannot return to power.

In this current confrontation, thankfully, both the military and the king have so far pledged their neutrality; anyhow, military intervention just led to a gap of some years; when finally the elections took place, a party similar to the previously ruling party was again voted back into office.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s unprecedented ruling that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense in their homes will immediately shift the legal battle over gun rights to California, the state with some of the toughest gun control laws in the nation. Gun rights advocates, led by the National Rifle Association, plan to file suit in federal court today challenging a San Francisco law that bans handguns in public housing, pouncing quickly on Thursday’s decision striking down Washington, D.C.’s broader ban on the same weapons.

The Supreme Court revived the nation’s gun control debate by directly assessing, for the first time in history, the meaning of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. In a 5-4 ruling, the justices placed limits on modern society’s efforts to deal with gun violence if they violate a constitutional right established two centuries ago to allow citizens to take up their muskets against government control. In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia stressed that the ruling does not preclude all regulation of firearms, citing restrictions in schools and government buildings and laws against felons possessing guns. The court left intact D.C.’s requirement that guns be licensed but struck down its requirements that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled.

This is probably for the first time that the Court has actually ruled on the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to individual citizens or was meant to apply to the militia (that were thought necessary at that time since there was no army, and the conception was that militias would be important for ensuring the security of the state). What is going to happen now is that there are a number of cases where existing cases and regulations are going to get challenged at the instigation of the NRA (National Rifle Association). Also, the worries about the changes to the Supreme Court due to the pushing of conservative justices seem to be coming true even more.
This ruling is going to cause a nightmare for administrators trying to control the spread of gun control and crime prevention, especially with regard to handguns (that are the most easily concealed of weapons); expect many more cases and litigation over this. Lower courts, especially in places such as New York, Washington, and California are going to have a much harder time deciphering this ruling and coming out with is permissible and what is not.

“Having heard that Miss Campbell had been affected by the baggage difficulties, he [Captain Sutherland] took the unusual decision to come and speak with her and explain the situation and make his apologies.” The court was told Ms Campbell became upset and demanded to know where her bag was. Ms Campbell swore at the captain and said she wanted him to get off the plane and get her bag.
The court heard BA staff asked Ms Campbell to leave the plane but she continued to shout and swear and talk into her mobile phone, so the police were called. The prosecution said Ms Campbell kicked one of the officers in the thigh. She kicked another officer in the shin, wedged herself in her seat and spat at the officers, the court was told.

Now, a lot of people were affected by the luggage problem, but why does a celebrity feel that the celebrity can show outrageous behavior and get away ? If more people do this, this would have caused serious problems overall. She should be handed a sentence, and adding community service to any sentence would be just.

However, it is very hard to justify locking people up for years altogether without bringing in charges against them; it goes against the concept of law and the rights of man whereby everybody is entitled to a trial in a free society. The United States is not a banana republic whereby laws and the rights of individuals are at the whims and fancies of a single person. In this overall discussion, the US courts are slowly changing their stance, from initially supporting the policies of the Bush administration to questioning their treatment of the detainees:

The U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo prisoners have constitutional rights has fundamentally changed the rules for trying them and could bring down the special war crimes court, defence lawyers said. Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling did not directly address the legality of the Guantanamo court but it gave the defendants a new avenue to challenge its jurisdiction to try them. The 2006 law that laid the foundation for the trials at the U.S. naval base in Cuba said that court can only try “unlawful enemy combatants,” a term used by the Bush administration for fighters it considers undeserving of the legal protections granted to civilians and soldiers.
That status was determined by an administrative panel of military officers, a system that critics said allowed the jailers to be the judges. Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling said prisoners had the right to challenge that status in the U.S. federal courts, forcing the government to show evidence to continue holding them.

This ruling forces the Bush administration to think anew over its policies in the area of the treatment of the detainees; even though the administration, and even the Republican candidate, McCain has opposed the judgment, and the judgment was delivered by a razor thin minority of 5-4.