By Megan
Abbot
Police in El
Salvador have begun to arrest former military officers accused in the killing
of six Jesuit priests during the country’s civil war. The murders of the Jesuits occurred in 1989,
and it is presumed that the priests were killed by the regime as they attempted
to broker a peace agreement that might have been too sympathetic to the
guerillas. Since 1989, an amnesty had
prevented domestic prosecutions, but families of the victims now seek justice
in Spain through their law of universal jurisdiction, since five of the priests
were Spanish. Elisabeth Malkin reports for the New York
Times that after the US
extradited one of the accused to Spain, police in El Salvador have undertaken
raids to arrest several of the others accused.
By Justin Kirschner
But “joining
hands” is just how China described the US-Sino relationship in fighting
cross-border corruption after the
US repatriated wanted economic fugitive Yang Jinjun ahead of President Xi’s
first state visit to the US. Just days
later, China heralded the return
of another fugitive, Kuang Wan Fang, who was serving a prison term in the
US for financial crimes, but was wanted in China for corruption and bribery
linked to those same crimes that got her thrown behind bars in the US.
By Kelley
Chittenden
Vladimir
Drinkman and Dmitriy Smilianets pleaded guilty this week to
involvement in the largest computer hacking conspiracy ever prosecuted in the
United States. The men infiltrated sixteen companies’ networks including
NASDAQ, 7-Eleven Inc., France’s Carrefour S.A., J.C. Penney Company Inc., JetBlue Airways, a Visa
Inc. licensee, and Heartland Payment Systems, Inc., compromising over 160
million credit card numbers and racking up more than 300 million dollars in
losses over nearly seven years. Drinkman had been in U.S. custody since his extradition to the United States after a
June 2012 arrest in the Netherlands. Three other men involved in the hacking of
security networks and mining of personal data, Aleksandr Kalinin, Roman Kotov,
and Mikhail Rytikov, still remain at large.
By Ena Cefo
In the case of Trabelsi v. Belgium, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)
held that the extradition of a Tunisian national from Belgium to the United
States violated Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, dealing
with the prohibition on inhuman and degrading treatment. Mr. Trabelsi
complained that his extradition to the United States exposed him to an
irreducible life sentence and was thus a violation of Article 3. ECHR holds
that a life sentence is not itself prohibited by Article 3, but is a violation
if it is irreducible. Given the
gravity of Mr. Trabelsi’s terrorism charges, the relevant U.S. criminal
penalties, and the lack of assurances by U.S. authorities to spare Mr. Trabelsi
from an irreducible life sentence, the ECHR ruled that Mr. Trabelsi would
potentially face an irreducible
sentence and his extradition was thus in violation of Article 3.
