The Justice Department today announced that it has reached an agreement with the city of Baltimore, Maryland, to end hiring practices that discriminate against people with disabilities. The agreement, filed as a consent decree along with a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, resolves allegations by the department that the city engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Title I of the ADA prohibits employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of disability in various aspects of employment, including hiring

Attorney General Eric Holder and Associate Attorney General Tony West announced today that the Department of Justice has reached a $16.65 billion settlement with Bank of America Corporation – the largest civil settlement with a single entity in American history ­— to resolve federal and state claims against Bank of America and its former and current subsidiaries, including Countrywide Financial Corporation and Merrill Lynch. As part of this global resolution, the bank has agreed to pay a $5 billion penalty

The Justice Department today announced the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan’s termination of the consent judgment relating to the Detroit Police Department’s (DPD) use of force and arrest and witness detention practices. The Justice Department and the city of Detroit jointly sought the termination of the consent judgment and approval of a Transition Agreement maintaining federal oversight of the DPD for an additional 18 months. The transition agreement starts a new chapter of reform and accountability for the DPD as it works in collaboration with the Justice Department to better ensure constitutional policing, promote community confidence, and improve public safety in the city of Detroit. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan have worked cooperatively throughout the duration of this matter

Three Puerto Rico police officers, Erick Rivera Nazario, Angel Torres Quinones and Antonio Rodriguez Caraballo today pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges in connection with the fatal beating of 19-year-old Jose Luis Irizarry Perez, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Molly Moran for the Civil Rights Division, United States Attorney Rosa Emilia Rodriguez-Velez for the District of Puerto Rico, and Special Agent in Charge Carlos Cases of the FBI San Juan Field Office.

The United States filed a complaint in federal court in Chicago to bar Laurie G. Helfer, aka Laurie G. Powell, individually and through her businesses Laurie’s Freelance & Tax Preparation Services and Tax Lady Laurie Inc., from preparing federal tax returns for others, the Justice Department announced today

The Department of Justice released today its second report to Congress entitled Indian Country Investigations and Prosecutions, which provides a range of enforcement statistics required under the Tribal Law and Order Act of 2010, as well as information about the progress of the Attorney General’s initiatives to reduce violent crime and strengthen tribal justice systems

The Department of Justice announced today that it will require Tyson Foods Inc. to divest Heinold Hog Markets, its sow purchasing business, in order to proceed with its $8.5 billion acquisition of The Hillshire Brands Company. The department said that, without the required divestiture, the transaction would have combined companies that account for more than a third of sow purchases from U.S. farmers, thereby likely reducing competition for purchases of sows from farmers.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Molly Moran for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and U.S. Attorney Andrew M. Luger for the District of Minnesota today announced the filing of a lawsuit against the city of St. Anthony Village for an alleged violation of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 (RLUIPA). Specifically, the lawsuit seeks injunctive relief requiring St. Anthony Village to allow the Abu Huraira Islamic Center to maintain a worship space in the basement of the St. Anthony Business Center.

Today, the Justice Department asked a federal court to dismiss the injunction to address civil rights violations at Saint Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C., because the District of Columbia and the Department of Behavioral Health have significantly improved the care and treatment of persons confined to Saint Elizabeths Hospital. Saint Elizabeths is the district’s facility for treating individuals with mental health conditions. The reforms, which were implemented following requirements under a court order, have ensured that persons at Saint Elizabeths Hospital are discharged to the community with adequate supports to live in integrated settings. Further, the reforms resulted in important improvements in integrated treatment planning, psychological and psychiatric services, nursing care and protection from assault.

The Justice Department announced today the filing of a lawsuit with the Executive Office for Immigration Review against Louisiana Crane Company LLC (Louisiana Crane), which is headquartered in Eunice, Louisiana.

The Justice Department announced today that it reached an agreement with Culinaire International, a catering and restaurant management company headquartered in Houston, Texas, resolving a claim that Culinaire engaged in citizenship discrimination during the employment eligibility reverification process in violation of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The Department of Justice has seized approximately $500,000 in assets traceable to corruption proceeds accumulated by Chun Doo Hwan, the former president of the Republic of Korea. This seizure brings the total value of seized corruption proceeds of President Chun to more than $1.2 million.

Child Cyber Safety Night at the Ballpark is the latest effort by the Justice Department and its law enforcement and community partners to encourage parents to speak with their children about online and cell phone safety and provide prevention materials.

The Justice Department today filed a lawsuit against the Kent State University, the Kent State University Board of Trustees and university officials for violating the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against students with disabilities in student housing.

Earlier today, Associate Attorney General Tony West, Assistant Attorney General Stuart Delery for the Civil Division and members of the Department’s Elder Justice Initiative met with stakeholders in the field of elder abuse and financial exploitation to launch the Elder Justice website.

The Department of Justice announced today that it has entered into a settlement agreement with the School District of Philadelphia that resolves a religious accommodations lawsuit filed in March 2014. In its lawsuit, the United States alleged that the school district violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) by failing to accommodate the religious beliefs, observances and/or practices of Siddiq Abu-Bakr, a school police officer who is Muslim, and similarly-situated employees who maintain a beard longer than one-quarter inch for religious purposes.

The United States has requested that the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi permanently bar Nathaniel Kimble, Greenville, Mississippi, man from preparing federal income tax returns for others, the Justice Department announced today.

On January 15, 2009, the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISC-R) published an unclassified version of its opinion in In Re: Directives Pursuant to Section 105B of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 551 F.3d 1004 (Foreign Intel. Surv. Ct. Rev. 2008). The classified version of the opinion was issued on August 22, 2008, following a challenge by Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!) to directives issued under the Protect America Act of 2007 (PAA). Today, following a renewed declassification review, the Executive Branch is publicly releasing various documents from this litigation, including legal briefs and additional sections of the 2008 FISC-R opinion, with appropriate redactions to protect national security information. These documents are available at the website of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), www.dni.gov; and ODNI’s public website dedicated to fostering greater public visibility into the intelligence activities of the U.S. Government, IContheRecord.tumblr.com. A summary of the underlying litigation follows.

The Department of Justice and the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), which administers AmeriCorps national service programs, has awarded $1.8 million in grants to increase the effective and efficient adjudication of immigration proceedings involving certain children who have crossed the U.S. border without a parent or legal guardian.

Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has signed an antitrust cooperation agreement with the Colombian antitrust agency on behalf of the Department of Justice. The agreement also was signed by Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Edith Ramirez, and went into effect today with the signature of Pablo Felipe Robledo, Colombia’s Superintendent of Industry and Commerce.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced today the launch of the Justice Department’s National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that the Department of Justice and 19 states and the District of Columbia have entered into a $1.375 billion settlement agreement with the rating agency Standard &s Financial Services LLC, along with its parent corporation McGraw Hill Financial Inc., to resolve allegations that S&s 2013 lawsuit against S& true credit risks. Other allegations assert that S&s business relationships with the investment banks that issued the securities.

The Justice Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, along with 49 state attorneys general and the District of Columbia’s attorney general, have reached a $470 million agreement with HSBC Bank USA NA and its affiliates (collectively, HSBC) to address mortgage origination, servicing and foreclosure abuses

Justice J S Verma will be our guest at Idea Exchange on Tuesday, January 29 at 12.15 pm. Send us your questions for him.

The Brookings Doha Center (BDC) hosted a keynote event on March 4, 2020 featuring Sihem Bensedrine, the president of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission (Instance Vérité et Dignité; IVD) and a veteran Tunisian human rights activist and journalist. Bensedrine helped found the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH), which is part of the National Dialogue…

Executive summaryTo wind down a 50-year war, the Colombian state and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército Popular (FARC-EP) agreed in November 2016 to stop the fighting and start addressing the underlying causes of the conflict—rural poverty, marginalization, insecurity, and lawlessness. Central to their pact is an ambitious effort to address the conflict’s nearly 8…

In June 2016, the government of Colombia signed a historic peace agreement with the armed rebel group known as FARC-EP to end a conflict that over five decades had taken the lives of at least 260,000 Colombians and displaced over 7 million. Three years later, the peace accord—a complex effort to not only stop the…

Since October, Somalia has been rocked by a struggle between Mukhtar Robow, an amnestied former top-level al-Shabab commander, and Somalia’s federal government. The crisis exacerbated the fraught tensions in a sensitive state-building process between the Mohamed Abdullahi “Farmajo” Mohamed government and Somalia’s forming sub-federal states. Critically, it also exposed the problems of secretive deals with…

At the start of the long war in Afghanistan, acts of torture and related war crimes were committed by the U.S. military and the CIA at the Bagram Internment Facility and in so-called “black sites” in eastern Europe. Such actions, even though they were not a standard U.S. practice and were stopped by an Executive…

The Brookings Doha Center (BDC) hosted a keynote event on March 4, 2020 featuring Sihem Bensedrine, the president of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission (Instance Vérité et Dignité; IVD) and a veteran Tunisian human rights activist and journalist. Bensedrine helped found the Tunisian Human Rights League (LTDH), which is part of the National Dialogue…

At the start of the long war in Afghanistan, acts of torture and related war crimes were committed by the U.S. military and the CIA at the Bagram Internment Facility and in so-called “black sites” in eastern Europe. Such actions, even though they were not a standard U.S. practice and were stopped by an Executive…

At the start of the long war in Afghanistan, acts of torture and related war crimes were committed by the U.S. military and the CIA at the Bagram Internment Facility and in so-called “black sites” in eastern Europe. Such actions, even though they were not a standard U.S. practice and were stopped by an Executive…

On June 28, the Hague Institute for Global Justice, in partnership with the Brookings Institution and Municipality of the Hague, will host Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy for the second annual Madeleine K. Albright Global Justice Lecture. Abi Williams, president of the Hague Institute, will give welcoming remarks and Ted Piccone, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, will moderate the discussion.

On September 26, the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement will host a discussion of the effect of the possible indictment on peace and justice, and potential impact on humanitarian and peacekeeping operations in Darfur and on the ICC itself.

A Judicial Issues Forum discussion among leading experts on the calamity in Darfur and the international community's failure to empower a suitable war crimes tribunal. The session reviewed the gravity of the situation in Sudan, the controversy over efforts to grant jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court, and the limited potential of other options—such as turning to the Rwanda genocide tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, as an alternative.

More than six years after the September 11 attacks, America is losing a crucial front in the ongoing war on terror—not to al Qaeda but to its own failure to construct a set of laws that will protect the American people and govern the American side of a conflict unlike any it has faced in…

As technology becomes more sophisticated, artificial intelligence (AI) is permeating into new parts of society and being used in criminal justice to assess risks for those in pre-trial or on probation. Predictive analytics raise several questions concerning bias, accuracy, and fairness. Observers worry that these tools replicate injustice and lead to unfair outcomes in pre-trial…

Executive summaryTo wind down a 50-year war, the Colombian state and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército Popular (FARC-EP) agreed in November 2016 to stop the fighting and start addressing the underlying causes of the conflict—rural poverty, marginalization, insecurity, and lawlessness. Central to their pact is an ambitious effort to address the conflict’s nearly 8…

In June 2016, the government of Colombia signed a historic peace agreement with the armed rebel group known as FARC-EP to end a conflict that over five decades had taken the lives of at least 260,000 Colombians and displaced over 7 million. Three years later, the peace accord—a complex effort to not only stop the…

One of the most venerated scientists of our time, James Hansen is the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a position he's held for three decades. Long before climate change was a household term, Hansen was one of the first to talk about

All over Thanksgiving, and with only a tiny press release...

Sam Suds and the Case of PVC The entire life cycle of PVC is an issue of environmental justice and racism. Many PVC plants are located near poor and communities of color. These facilities have poisoned workers and fence-line neighbors, polluted the

We apologize for the bad pun in the title, sometimes it's just hard to resist. Fair trade is a familiar concept to our readers. Aside from writing about well-known fair trade commodities like chocolate and coffee, we've also seen posts on everything

Tim had planned on working at a Salt Lake City Unitarian church doing social outreach. That is, until the Federal Bureau of Prisons decided that wasn't a "safe" occupation for the climate activist.

Last Saturday's Marathon Oil refinery explosion and fire was yet another dangerous, polluting event in a string of environmental injustices to plague the residents of the 48217 zip code in Detroit

On February 11, 1994, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order designed to bring about environmental justice.

A couple weeks ago, Jairo Mora Sandoval, a 26-year-old conservationist, was kidnapped by sea turtle poachers in Costa Rica. He was bound, beaten, and shot in the head. His body was found on the beach the next day.

The Justice Department dropped its criminal case against former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who admitted to lying to FBI agents about his conversation with a Russian diplomat.

The order would have required the Trump administration to turn over to Congress secretive materials produced in connection with Robert Mueller's Russian probe.

The Department of Justice has decided to drop the criminal case against President Trump's former national security advisor Michael Flynn. CNBC's Kayla Tausche reports.