All posts tagged: court decisions

Football player transfer rules ruled offside by top EU court – POLITICO

Football player transfer rules ruled offside by top EU court – POLITICO

Published by Sam

Judges said the rules “impede the free movement of professional footballers” and “are similar to a no-poach agreement.” While some restrictions could be justified, these “do not appear to be indispensable or necessary,” they said. “Those rules impose considerable legal risks, unforeseeable and potentially very high financial risks as well as major sporting risks on those players and clubs wishing to employ them which, taken together, are such as to impede international transfers of those players,” the court said in a statement. They also “have as their object the restriction, and even prevention, of cross-border competition which could be pursued by all clubs established in the European Union, by unilaterally recruiting players under contract with another club or players,” it said. “The possibility of competing by recruiting trained players plays an essential role in the professional football sector,” it said. “Rules which place a general restriction on that form of competition, by immutably fixing the distribution of workers between the employers and in cloistering the markets, are similar to a no-poach agreement,” it said. FIFA …

Trump classified documents trial in Florida postponed indefinitely

Trump classified documents trial in Florida postponed indefinitely

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Republican presidential candidate and former U.S. President Donald Trump gestures while he walks with his attorney Todd Blanche, as his criminal trial over charges that he falsified business records to conceal money paid to silence porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016 continues, at Manhattan state court in New York City, U.S., May 6, 2024.  Brendan Mcdermid | Reuters A federal judge Tuesday indefinitely postponed the criminal classified documents trial of former President Donald Trump, a court filing shows. The trial on charges that Trump willfully retained classified national security records after leaving the White House and then hid them from federal authorities was scheduled to start May 20. But the new ruling from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon vacates that date and sets a new slate of pretrial proceedings, the latest of which is a hearing set for July 22. The ruling casts more doubt on whether Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, will face trial on the federal criminal charges prior to the Nov. 5 election. Lawyers for Trump have urged Cannon, whom Trump …

Never give up – POLITICO

Never give up – POLITICO

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Heading the prosecution at the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg was Ferencz’s first major job as a lawyer. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile SS paramilitary death squads, assigned to kill Jews and others behind the eastern front. From 1941 to 1945, they murdered 1.3 million Jews, an estimated 250,000 Roma and another 500,00 partisans, people with disabilities, homosexuals, Slavic peoples and others. All 24 defendants had been commanders of Einsatzgruppen units, and were in the “field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest,” according to the tribunal’s final judgment. Twelve of them were sentenced to death by hanging, and the others were handed long prison terms. Ending up as a lawyer wasn’t always in the cards for Ferencz. He arrived in the U.S. from Romania as a baby and said he was lucky to survive the boat journey. He cried so much, his father was tempted to throw him overboard — though his uncle made sure he was safe. And growing up in a rough neighborhood in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, …

FIFA should lose EU legal dispute over player transfer rules, court aide says – POLITICO

FIFA should lose EU legal dispute over player transfer rules, court aide says – POLITICO

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The Court of Justice is ruling on a dispute from an unidentified professional player based in Paris whose contract at Russian football club Lokomotiv Moscow was terminated after one year over an alleged breach of its terms. The player challenged the decision in court in Belgium after a potential deal with Belgium’s Sporting du Pays de Charleroi fell through because of the FIFA rules. He is seeking €6 million in damages and loss of income. The EU court must rule on points of EU law to advise Belgian judges who will handle the final decision. “There can be little doubt as to the restrictive nature” of FIFA’s regulation on the status and transfer of players, Szpunar said in his opinion. “By their very nature, the contested provisions limit the possibility for players to switch clubs and, conversely, for (new) clubs to hire players, in a situation where a player has terminated his or her contract without just cause,” he said. “The contested provisions, by limiting clubs’ ability to recruit players, necessarily affect competition between clubs …

‘Pablo Escobar’ can’t be registered as EU trademark, court rules – POLITICO

‘Pablo Escobar’ can’t be registered as EU trademark, court rules – POLITICO

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Escobar, a narco-terrorist who was killed in a shootout in 1993, was the leader of the infamous Medellín Cartel and over decades of drug-trafficking became one of the world’s leading cocaine barons. Wednesday’s court decision came after EUIPO previously refused to accept the registration as Escobar’s name, and what the European public associates with it, contradicted EU values. “EUIPO rejected the application for registration on the ground that the mark was contrary to public policy and to accepted principles of morality,” a press release from the Court of Justice of the European Union said Wednesday, adding that EUIPO had relied on the perception of the Spanish public. According to the court, “reasonable Spaniards, with average sensitivity and tolerance thresholds” who shared European values “would associate the name of Pablo Escobar with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism and with the crimes and suffering resulting therefrom.” In its original decision in February 2023, EUIPO also referenced a ruling in which the registration of a restaurant chain called “La Mafia se sienta a la Mesa” (“The Mafia sits at …

France moves to make abortion a constitutional right amid rollbacks in US and Europe

France moves to make abortion a constitutional right amid rollbacks in US and Europe

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PARIS — France is set to become the first country to enshrine the freedom to have an abortion in its constitution — an effort by President Emmanuel Macron to send a strong message of support for reproductive rights and, at the same time, score political points at the expense of a resurgent far right. The amendment will be added to the French constitution if three-fifths of parliamentarians from the upper and lower houses approve the bill during an extraordinary voting session being held on Monday in Versailles. The measure sailed through both chambers of the French parliament and is expected to pass. Abortion rights are widely supported in France, and limiting them was not a publicly debated issue. While the French left has for years wanted to add a constitutional safeguard to an abortion, until 2022 most lawmakers believed such a move was unnecessary given the existing guarantees for women seeking an abortion. Macron’s government was spurred to action by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, giving individual states the green …

The Holy Land turns even more hellish – POLITICO

The Holy Land turns even more hellish – POLITICO

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All these donor countries are U.N. members and are, therefore, also parties to the ICJ’s statute. Except for Japan, they’ve also all signed and ratified the Genocide Convention, which was unanimously adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1948. As an instrument of international law, the convention obligates its 153 signatories to prevent the crime of genocide, and to punish or extradite persons committing any such acts listed in it. So, as it became evident that conditions in Gaza would become even more nightmarish and horrific, it quickly seemed to turn into a Pyrrhic victory for those around the world who regarded the ICJ’s provisional order as a win for international law. Of the 17 international judges presiding over this case, 16 of them — including Israeli ad hoc judge Aharon Barak — agreed with the urgent provisional measure stating that: “The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the …

German court bans funding for extreme-right party, fueling debate on AfD – POLITICO

German court bans funding for extreme-right party, fueling debate on AfD – POLITICO

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BERLIN — Germany’s top court ruled in favor of cutting state funding for an extreme-right party in a decision that is likely to further fuel an already strident debate in the country about whether legal steps should be taken to rein in the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). In a landmark ruling Tuesday, the Constitutional Court said state financing for a marginal, extremist party known as Die Heimat, or The Homeland — previously known as the National Democratic Party or NPD — could be cut because the party “shows disdain for the free democratic basic order” and aims to replace German democracy with an authoritarian state based on Nazi-era notions of a racially unified Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.” The decision is amplifying an impassioned debate in Germany about whether to undertake a legal effort to counter the AfD. For weeks, politicians have weighed in on the possibility of an outright prohibition of the party. Tuesday’s court decision is now sparking discussion on the possibility of revoking the party’s state funding. The court decision “would also be …

Courts Are Choosing TikTok Over Children

Courts Are Choosing TikTok Over Children

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Some court decisions are bad; others are abysmal. The bad ones merely misapply the law; abysmal decisions go a step further and elevate abstract principle over democratic will and basic morality. The latter’s flaw is less about legal error and more about “a judicial system gone wrong,” as the legal scholar Gerard Magliocca once put it. A case such as Hammer v. Dagenhart exemplifies the abysmal: The case, decided in 1918, struck down child-labor laws during an era of public outcry and concern about children working as long as 70 hours a week in dangerous jobs. Making it truly wretched was the Dagenhart court’s reliance on a dubious constitutional distinction to allow federal regulation of “evil” activities such as the lottery, prostitution, and the sale of alcohol but not of the employment of children. In our times, some of the leading candidates for the “abysmal” category are the extraordinarily out-of-touch decisions striking down laws protecting children from social-media harms. The exemplar is NetChoice v. Bonta, in which a U.S. district court in California struck down …