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Venezuela’s Supreme Court certifies Maduro’s claims that he won presidential election
Legal Business |
2024/08/25 15:24
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Venezuela’s Supreme Court has backed President Nicolás Maduro’s claims that he won last month’s presidential election and said voting tallies published online showing he lost by a landslide were forged.
The ruling is the latest attempt by Maduro to blunt protests and international criticism that erupted after the contested July 28 vote in which the self-proclaimed socialist leader was seeking a third, six-year term.
The high court is packed with Maduro loyalists and has almost never ruled against the government.
Its decision, read Thursday in an event attended by senior officials and foreign diplomats, came in response to a request by Maduro to review vote totals showing he had won by more than 1 million votes.
The main opposition coalition has accused Maduro of trying to steal the vote.
Thanks to a superb ground game on election day, opposition volunteers managed to collect copies of voting tallies from 80% of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide and which show opposition candidate Edmundo González won by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
The official tally sheets printed by each voting machine carry a QR code that makes it easy for anyone to verify the results and are almost impossible to replicate.
“An attempt to judicialize the results doesn’t change the truth: we won overwhelmingly and we have the voting records to prove it,” González, standing before a Venezuelan flag, said in a video posted on social media.
The high court’s ruling certifying the results contradicts the findings of experts from the United Nations and the Carter Center who were invited to observe the election and which both determined the results announced by authorities lacked credibility. Specifically, the outside experts noted that authorities didn’t release a breakdown of results by each of the 30,000 voting booths nationwide, as they have in almost every previous election.
The government has claimed — without evidence — that a foreign cyberattack staged by hackers from North Macedonia delayed the vote counting on election night and publication of the disaggregated results.
González was the only one of 10 candidates who did not participate in the Supreme Court’s audit, a fact noted by the justices, who in their ruling accused him of trying to spread panic.
The former diplomat and his chief backer, opposition powerhouse Maria Corina Machado, went into hiding after the election as security forces arrested more than 2,000 people and cracked down on demonstrations that erupted spontaneously throughout the country protesting the results.
Numerous foreign governments, including the U.S. as well as several allies of Maduro, have called on authorities to release the full breakdown of results.
Gabriel Boric, the leftist president of Chile and one of the main critics of Maduro’s election gambit, lambasted the high court’s certification. |
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Court rejects settlement in water dispute between New Mexico and Texas
Legal Business |
2024/06/21 12:22
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The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a settlement between Western states over the management of one of North America’s longest rivers.
The 5-4 decision rebuffs an agreement that had come recommended by a federal judge overseeing the case over how New Mexico, Texas and Colorado must share water from the Rio Grande. The high court found that the federal government still had claims about New Mexico’s water use that the settlement would not resolve.
U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Melloy had called the proposal a fair and reasonable way to resolve the conflict between Texas and New Mexico that would be consistent with a decadeslong water-sharing agreement between the two states as well as Colorado.
The federal government, though, lodged several objections, including that the proposal did not mandate specific water capture or use limitations within New Mexico.
New Mexico officials have said implementing the settlement would require reducing the use of Rio Grande water through a combination of efforts that range from paying farmers to leave their fields barren to making infrastructure improvements. Some New Mexico lawmakers have voiced concerns, but the attorney general who led the state’s negotiations had called the agreement a victory.
Farmers in southern New Mexico have had to rely more heavily on groundwater wells over the last two decades as drought and climate change resulted in reduced flows and less water in reservoirs along the Rio Grande. Texas sued over the groundwater pumping, claiming the practice was cutting into the amount of water that was ultimately delivered as part of the interstate compact.
The proposed settlement would recognize several measurements to ensure New Mexico delivers what’s owed to Texas. New Mexico, meanwhile, agreed to drop its challenges against Texas in exchange for clarifying how water will be accounted for as it flows downstream. The agreement also outlined transfers if not enough or too much water ended up in Texas. |
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Why Trump's bid for president is in the hands of the Supreme Court
Legal Business |
2024/02/08 12:05
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The fate of former President Donald Trump’s attempt to return to the White House is in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.
On Thursday, the justices will hear arguments in Trump’s appeal of a Colorado Supreme Court ruling that he is not eligible to run again for president because he violated a provision in the 14th Amendment preventing those who “engaged in insurrection” from holding office.
Many legal observers expect the nation’s highest court will reverse the Colorado ruling rather than remove the leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination from the ballot. But it’s always tricky to try to predict a Supreme Court ruling, and the case against Trump has already broken new legal ground.
“No Person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Trump’s lawyers say this part of the Constitution wasn’t meant to apply to the president. Notice how it specifically mentions electors, senators and representatives, but not the presidency.
It also says those who take an oath to “support” the United States, but the presidential oath doesn’t use that word. Instead, the Constitution requires presidents to say they will “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. And finally, Section 3 talks about any other “officer” of the United States, but Trump’s lawyers argue that language is meant to apply to presidential appointees, not the president.
That was enough to convince the Colorado district court judge who initially heard the case. She found that Trump had engaged in insurrection, but also agreed that it wasn’t clear that Section 3 applied to the president. That part of her decision was reversed by the Colorado Supreme Court.
The majority of the state’s highest court wrote: “President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land.”
Trump’s lawyers contend that the question of who is covered by a rarely used, once obscure clause should be decided by Congress, not unelected judges. They contend that the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol wasn’t an insurrection. They say the attack wasn’t widespread, didn’t involve large amounts of firearms or include other markers of sedition. They say Trump didn’t “engage” in anything that day other than in exercising his protected free speech rights.
Others who have been skeptical of applying Section 3 to Trump have made an argument that the dissenting Colorado Supreme Court justices also found persuasive: The way the court went about finding that Trump violated Section 3 violated the former president’s due process rights. They contend he was entitled to a structured legal process rather than a court in Colorado trying to figure out if the Constitution applied to him.
That gets at the unprecedented nature of the cases. Section 3 has rarely been used after an 1872 congressional amnesty excluded most former Confederates from it. The U.S. Supreme Court has never heard such a case. |
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Russian Olympic officials appeal to sports court against suspension by IOC
Legal Business |
2023/11/10 08:13
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The Russian Olympic Committee has appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sports against a suspension by the IOC last month for incorporating Ukrainian sports councils.
CAS said Monday it has registered the appeal but that “it is not possible to indicate a time frame” for a verdict by its panel of judges. A hearing is likely to be held in Lausanne, Switzerland, which is home to the court and the International Olympic Committee.
The legal dispute should have no effect on Russian athletes preparing to qualify for, and compete at, the Paris Olympics next year.
The IOC previously said any Russian athletes accepted as neutral individuals to compete in Paris could be invited directly via their sport’s world governing body in a process bypassing the ROC.
The latest Russia-IOC dispute was provoked by the Russian Olympic body incorporating the sports councils in four regions in occupied eastern Ukraine as its own members.
Imposing the suspension last month, the IOC said the Russian action “constitutes a breach of the Olympic Charter because it violates the territorial integrity of the NOC of Ukraine.”
The ROC made a similar move in 2016 to incorporate sports councils in the Crimea region which had been annexed by Russia two years earlier. The IOC did not issue a suspension that time.
CAS said Monday the Russian appeal asks for the ROC to be reinstated “benefiting from all rights and prerogatives granted by the Olympic Charter.”
The suspension removes the right of the ROC to get a share of Olympic broadcast and sponsor money worth millions of dollars in each four-year Olympic funding cycle. Russian officials reportedly have been weighing legal action to access the money not being paid due to economic sanctions during the war in Ukraine. |
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Ban on electronic skill games in Virginia reinstated by state Supreme Court
Legal Business |
2023/10/09 15:44
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A ban on electronic skill games in Virgnia went back into effect Friday after the state Supreme Court vacated an injunction that allowed thousands of the betting machines to remain in gas stations, bars and conveniece stores.
The injunction was issued by a lower court in an ongoing lawsuit that argues the ban is a violation of free speech. But a panel of three Supreme Court justices found that the suit is unlikely to succeed.
“Although at times it is difficult to determine where a particular activity falls on the speech/conduct continuum, no such difficulty is present when the activity being regulated is gambling. We long have viewed gambling as conduct that may be heavily regulated and even banned by the Commonwealth as an exercise of its police powers,” the panel wrote in its order.
The games look and play like slot machines, though manufacturers say there is an element of skill involved.
The General Assembly passed legislation outlawing skill games in 2020, but former Gov. Ralph Northam delayed it for a year to help the state raise money for COVID-19 relief efforts.
The ban then took effect in 2021, but the lawsuit resulted in an injunction that allowed games already registered with the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Authoirty to continue until the issue is resolved.
The lawsuit is now set to go to trial in December.
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