Despite the government prosecutor's vow to appeal this week's innocent verdict for Ann Patton, criminal lawyers doubt she will face another trial in the 2010 shooting death of her husband John Felix Bender.
They have fought for 15 years for the right to access in vitro fertilization in their home country, and last Thursday was supposed to be a happier day. That day, President Luis Guillermo Solís announced that a draft decree that would finally legalize IVF in Costa Rica was ready, after a long and frustrating battle.
The bill would reform several articles of the family code to formally recognize “stable" relationships of more than three years between two people, regardless of their “sex, identity, sexual orientation or choice” with all the personal and property protections of legal marriage.
Business leaders celebrated a court decision Friday that they say guarantees Costa Rica's public hospitals, ports and electricity grid will continue to function even if public sector workers are involved in a labor dispute.
The Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, or Sala IV, ruled in favor of an appellant whose employer ordered him to shut down a private WhatsApp group chat named after the clinical laboratory at the Max Terán Valls Hospital in Quepos, Puntarenas.
Two expats in Costa Rica have won an appeal against the local government of Talamanca, which declared the foreigners “personas non grata" in the Caribbean beach town of Puerto Viejo for being “environmentalists,” according to a statement from the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
The Supreme Court’s Constitutional Chamber, or Sala IV, ruled that the Costa Rican Social Security System did not unfairly discriminate against an obese man who applied and was not hired for a job.
“We are reaching a point where we will be forced to make a decision. That includes the possibility of passing IVF by an executive decree so that the country does not have to face another sanction,” Solís told reporters.
Costa Rica’s Supreme Court ordered prison officials to come up with a plan to relieve overcrowding in the San Sebastián prison within one month. The court said prisoners "are sleeping on pieces of mattresses or on the ground, putting up with the cold” and rats climbing out of the drains at night.
If people get squeamish at the thought of sleeping in hotel beds, image this: Prisoners at La Reforma penitentiary sued for nicer mattresses for their conjugal visits.
