[JURIST] A document leaked to the BBC has raised new questions about the nature of the legal advice UK Prime Minister Tony Blair received from his Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, on the eve of the Iraq war. The document [text], dated March 7, 2003, suggested that the "safest legal course would be to secure the adoption of a further [UN Security Council] resolution to authorise the use of force". No such resolution was forthcoming and the final advice given by Goldsmith did not contain the recommendation. Another document leaked earlier this week [JURIST report] to the Mail on Sunday newspaper showed that the Attorney General had multiple reservations about the legality of the war which were ultimately not conveyed in the one-page summary delivered to cabinet and later presented to Parliament. The Iraq legal advice has become an election issue as the Blair government is standing for re-election on May 5; in recent days UK Conservative leader has accused Blair outright of "lying" to the British public about the Iraq war. Lord Goldsmith, meanwhile, responded to the latest leak by saying [Goldsmith statement] that he had concluded at the time that the Iraq war was legal and stood by that advice. BBC News has more.

[JURIST] Members of the US Senate Intelligence Committee [official website] told senior Bush administration officials Wednesday that lack of disclosure regarding enforcement of the Patriot Act was hurting efforts to renew 15 key provisions set to expire at the end of this year. Senators noted public concerns about govermment spying prompted by insufficient information about the act, and complained that they themselves had not recieved a promised report on FBI use of a provision requiring ISPs and other businesses to hand over consumer or subscriber information. US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales [Gonzales-Mueller joint testimony, PDF], FBI Director Robert Mueller and CIA Director Porter Gross [prepared testimony] defended the act as having facilitated key arrests and prosecutions, including that of Islamic scholar Ali al-Timimi, convicted Tuesday [JURIST report] of inciting his followers to holy war and joining the Taliban against the United States in the wake of the September 11 attacks. AP has more.

[JURIST] Togo opposition presidential candidate Bob Akitani [party website in French] Wednesday claimed he had won the presidency of the country with 70% of the vote and called for people to resist the government a day after official results put him a distant second to ruling party candidate Faure Gnassingbe in a poll rife with claims and counterclaims of fraud and intimidation. After the official results were announced Tuesday crowds of youths took to the streets in the capital Lome and elsewhere across the country to protest the vote; in the violence that followed hospital sources say that 11 people were killed and almost 100 were injured. As violence continued for a second day in some areas the government closed down most private radio stations as well as the local relay for Radio France International. The Togo government website is highlighting a statement by the Nigerian Foreign Minister that Akitani's claim to the presidency is "unconstitutional" [press statement in French]. Opposition sources say they are preparing to appeal the official results to Togo's constitutional court. BBC News has more.

[JURIST] President Bush Wednesday signed legislation giving legal protection to developers of technologies designed to enable viewers to "self-censor" portions of DVD movies that they deem inappropriate for viewing by others or themselves. S. 167, the Family Entertainment and Copyright Act creates an exemption from current copyright law that would have allowed film producers to sue the filter-makers for creating altered copies of their works, even if the content removed could be deemed offensive. A major beneficiary of the legislation is Utah-based ClearPlay Inc. [corporate website], whose filtering technology is already bundled with some DVD players. ClearPlay applauded the legislation [press release] after its passage by Congress earlier this month. The bill signed by the President also criminalizes the use of recording equipment to make copies of movies in movie theaters and contains miscellaneous provisions related to film preservation. AP has more.

[JURIST] The US Supreme Court ruled Wednesday in Bates v. Dow Agrosciences [backgrounder from Duke Law] that a group of Texas farmers could sue a chemical company for damage caused to their crops by a weed killer. Dow had argued that federal labelling law prevented states from imposing any kind of labelling requirement apart from that mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency, but the court majority ruled in an opinion by Justice Stevens that the scenario raised general tort questions about a defective product which might not be pre-empted. Read the opinion [PDF]. AP has more.

Also Wednesday, the Court ruled in Pace v. DiGuglielmo [backgrounder from Duke Law] that a PA prison inmate sentenced in 1985 to life imprisonment had filed a federal habeas application claiming ineffective assistance of counsel and trial court error too late for consideration. Read the 5-4 opinion [PDF] by Chief Justice Rehnquist.

[JURIST] The New York Court of Appeal hears arguments Wednesday afternoon on whether the state's 50-year old statutory ban on the televising of trials is constitutional under state and federal law. New York temporarily allowed video coverage of trial proceedings for a ten year period beginning in 1987, but the authorization lapsed in 1997 and was not renewed. The challenge to the ban, imposed at the outset of the television age, is being argued by attorney David Boies representing Court TV with the support of the New York State Bar Association, which argued in a February amicus brief that appropriate safeguards could be built to coverage to avoid potential problems. A lower New York appellate court ruled against Court TV [text] last year. The Westchester Journal-News has more.

[JURIST] A bill to legalize same-sex marriage in California has passed its first legislative test. The California Assembly Judiciary Committee [official website] approved it 6-3 Tuesday, clearing it to move on to another committee and, if again approved, from there to the Assembly floor. Opponents of the bill argue that it is clearly inconsistent with Proposition 22 [text], a ballot initiative approved five years ago by California voters that limit marriage to unions between a man and a woman. The legislation is moving forward at the same time that the general legality of same-sex marriage in California is being weighed in the state courts in the wake of a spate of same-sex marriage licenses issued by the city of San Francisco last year. AP has more.

[JURIST] Nepalese police arrested former Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba [Wikipedia profile] Wednesday in a middle-of-the-night raid on his residence after he had refused to appear as requested [JURIST report] before a royal commission investigating government corruption. The arrest was made four days before the scheduled end of a national state of emergency declared by King Gyanendra on February 1, when he dismissed Deuba's government for not successfully putting down the country's ongoing Maosit rebellion, which has taken over 11,000 lives over nine years. Nepal's former Foreign Minister was arrested last week after a similar refusal; former senior politicians claim that the Royal Commission on Corruption Control is unconstitutional, having been constituted by royal fiat. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] Hopes for a bipartisn resolution of the judicial filibusters issue faded Wednesday in the wake of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's rejection of a compromise [JURIST report] advanced by Minority Leader Harry Reid that would have allowed at least two of the President's blocked judicial nominees to go forward with the understanding that current rules allowing filibusters of judicial nominations would be preserved. Frist said Tuesday that he would insist on up-and-down votes for all nominees and would accept no deal. Senator Reid offered this reaction [text] from the Senate floor. AP has more.

[JURIST] Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said Wednesday that Republicans were prepared to reverse course on controversial changes to House ethics rules that had raised Democratic ire and had led to deadlock in the House Ethics Committee [official website], preventing it from getting down to business this term. The most problematic change involved altering committee procedures so that an ethics complaint would automatically be dismissed unless a majority of the panel voted to act on it within 45 days; formerly, an ethics complaint would automatically trigger an investigation unless the panel voted to dismiss it in the same time-period. Democrats accused Republicans of making this and other changes to shield House Majority Leader Tom DeLay [official website] from ethics probes; in 2004 the committee cited DeLay three times for ethics infractions [October 2004 complaint report]. Hastert suggested that without a functioning Ethics Committee freed from deadlock DeLay could not appear to clear his name. AP has more.

8:44 PM ET - AP is reporting that the House has voted to reverse the rule changes.

[JURIST] The Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress ruled Wednesday that under the Hong Kong Basic Law [text] the new leader of Hong Kong to be selected on July 10 will serve out the remaining two years of his predecessor's term and not a brand new 5-year term. The ruling, which follows a draft recommendation made earlier this week, will likely allow Acting Chief Executive Donald Tsang [official profile] to remain in office while China and Hong Kong citizens evaluate his suitability for longer service, although Hong Kong democrats say that a ruling by Hong Kong's own courts in favor of a full-term election would have been more appropriate. The Hong Kong government has posted a news release on the ruling. AP has more.

[JURIST] The Minuteman Project [project website], a civilian border patrol group that has already claimed credit for alerting federal authorities to over 300 illegal border crossings from Mexico, announced Tuesday that it wants to expand its operations northwards to the much longer Canadian border. A spokesman said that the group hopes to establish citizen patrols for Idaho, Michigan, North Dakota and Vermont. Minuteman patrols are scheduled to begin near San Diego by June and across the entire US-Mexico border by October. The group's leaders say they are taking action in the absence of adequate measures by the official US Border Patrol [official website] to properly secure the borders and stop illegal immigrants coming in to the United States. US government officials all the way up to the President have said they are opposed to vigilante groups and that border security is properly the business of the Border Patrol. AP has more.

[JURIST] A Russian court Wednesday postponed until May 16 a scheduled verdict in the controversial tax fraud prosecution of oil magnate and former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky [JURIST news archive]. The postponement was announced by a simple notice on a Moscow courthouse door which cited no reasons for the delay. Observers speculate that the postponement may be an attempt to avoid embarrassing Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is due to arrive in Israel Wednesday evening (Khodorkovsky is Jewish) and will be returning to host a gathering of some 50 world leaders in Moscow on May 9 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe during World War II. Russia has come under considerable international pressure over the trial, which is said to have been politically motivated since Khodorkovsky had helped fund a political party opposed to Putin. On an official visit to Russia last week, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview with Russian media [State Dept. transcript] that the US was following the Khodorkovsky case closely to see what it said about the current state of the rule of law in thje country. In a statement posted on Khodorkovsky's defense website, Khodorkovsky associate and spokesman Leonid Nevlin said:

Only in a non-democratic country, can the president intervene so blatantly in a legal process and control the courts to the extent that he predetermines the verdict and the dates of the court decision regarding his political enemies. Putin has once again demonstrated, that Russia is not a democracy, and that he is its sole ruler. By postponing the court's ruling to a date after May 9th, when President Bush and other world leaders are expected to visit Russia, Putin once again shows the world that he holds his political opponents hostage, using them as bargaining chips for the achievement of his ambitions.

[JURIST] The Council of Europe, the continent's human rights watchdog institution, condemned US detention practices at Guantanamo Bay Tuesday in a sharply-worded resolution [text] passed by the parliamentary assembly of the 41-nation body accusing the US of having "betrayed its own highest principles in the zeal with which it has attempted to pursue the 'war on terror'." The Council asserted that the Guantanamo Bay detentions had showed "unlawfulness and inconsistency with the rule of law" on multiple grounds:

.i. many if not all detainees have been subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment occurring as a direct result of official policy, authorised at the very highest levels of government;

ii. many detainees have been subjected to ill-treatment amounting to torture which has occurred systematically and with the knowledge and complicity of the US Government;

iii. the rights of those detained in connection with the international armed conflict previously conducted by the USA in Afghanistan to be presumptively recognised as prisoners-of-war (POWs) and to have their status independently determined by a competent tribunal were not respected;

iv. there have been numerous violations of various aspects of all detainees’ rights to liberty and security of the person, making their detention arbitrary;

v. there have been numerous violations of various aspects of all detainees’ rights to fair trial, amounting to a flagrant denial of justice;

vi. the USA has engaged in the unlawful practice of secret detention;

vii. the USA has, by practicing “rendition” (removal of persons to other countries, without judicial supervision, for purposes such as interrogation or detention), allowed detainees to be subjected to torture and to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, in violation of the principle of non-refoulement;

viii. US proposals to return or transfer detainees to other countries, even where reliant on “diplomatic assurances” concerning the detainees’ subsequent treatment, risk violating the principle of non-refoulement.