[JURIST] Former South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma [party profile] is set to appear in court again Tuesday, where he faces corruption charges [JURIST report] stemming from an arms-procurement scandal. Zuma was fired as South Africa's deputy president in June 2005 after a close business associate was convicted of fraud and corruption [JURIST reports].

Zuma's corruption trial was postponed [JURIST report] for the second time in July to allow for further investigation. Zuma was recently acquitted on rape charges [JURIST report] and subsequently reinstated [JURIST report] as deputy president of South Africa's ruling African National Congress [party website]. Zuma has said he believes the corruption charges are part of an effort to prevent him from running against South African President Thabo Mbeki [BBC profile] in the 2009 election. Zuma's lawyer has pressed for a speedy trial [JURIST report] so as not disrupt Zuma's political goals. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] A former Bosnian Serb police chief convicted of war crimes [PDF indictment] in 2001 was found dead in his home in Bosnia Friday with a gunshot to his head and a pistol in his hand. An autopsy has not yet been completed, though it appears the 49-year-old committed suicide.

Stevan Todorovic was released from prison [JURIST report] last year after completing only two-thirds of his ten-year sentence, which he received after pleading guilty to one count of "ethnic cleansing." The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia [official website] agreed to release Todorovic early partly because he was willing to testify in other tribunal cases. RFE/RL has more.

[JURIST] A US district judge in Tucson Friday dismissed a controversial case against two humanitarians arrested in July 2005 for aiding illegal immigrants they found in need of emergency medical attention in the Arizona desert. At the time of their arrests, Shanti Sellz and Daniel Strauss were volunteering for No More Deaths [advocacy website; press release], a group that works to reduce the number of migrant deaths [Arizona Daily Star database] in the desert. The volunteers were stopped by US Border Patrol [official website] officers while attempting to transport three sick migrants to a clinic in Tucson.

Sellz and Strauss said they were following a protocol for transporting undocumented immigrants [JURIST news archive] approved by the Border Patrol when they were arrested. The protocol involves checking with a lawyer and a doctor before transporting migrants; the organization, however, is working on a new protocol that would require volunteers to call 911 or Border Patrol when encountering migrants with medical emergencies. The decision by Judge Raner C. Collins to dismiss the case is a big win for the immigrant-aid movement near the US-Mexico border, which has adopted the slogan "Humanitarian aid is never a crime" [Amnesty International backgrounder]. The Tucson Citizen has more.

[JURIST] Egyptian-mediated negotiations [JURIST report] to free an Israeli soldier held by Palestinian Hamas militants are ongoing, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak [official profile; BBC profile] told a Cairo newspaper Saturday. The capture of Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit [Wikipedia backgrounder] by Hamas in Gaza in June prompted Israel to detain about 30 Palestinian lawmakers [JURIST report] in retaliation, including nearly a third of the Hamas-led Palestinian cabinet. Hamas [CFR backgrounder; JURIST news archive] originally demanded the release of Palestinian and Arab prisoners in exchange for the return of the Israeli soldier but Israel [JURIST news archive] has publicly refused to agree to a prisoner swap. Mubarak acknowledged that Egyptian mediators are working on a plan that calls for a specification of Palestinian conditions for a prisoner exchange that could include the release of Palestinian women and minors from Israeli jails.

Earlier negotiations broke down after the capture of two more Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah militants [US State Dept. backgrounder; BBC backgrounder] set off an Israeli offensive in Lebanon [JURIST news archive]. Mubarak suggested that "other parties", possibly referring to Syria, could have influenced Hamas to reject the previous plan to exchange prisoners. AP has more.

[JURIST] A report [text] released Saturday by OpenTheGovernment.org [official website], a private monitoring group, reveals what it described as further expansion of US government secrecy [press release] notwithstanding an increase in the number of classified government documents unsealed in 2005. In comparison to 2004, the public's use of the Freedom of Information Act [text] in 2005 increased and the number of declassified pages was 29.5 million, up 1.1 million since 2004, but still quite low when compared to the 75 million documents that were unsealed in 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration. Meanwhile, federal officials created new categories of sensitive information and claimed more legal privileges in court, allowing them to keep 14.2 million documents "top secret," "secret" or "confidential," at a cost of $7.7 billion. Director of OpenTheGovernmnet.org Patrice McDermott remarked that "every administration wants to control information about its policies and practices, but the current administration has restricted access to information about our government and its policies at unprecedented levels."

The politically sensitive report notes that in 2005 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) [FJC backgrounder] approved all 2,072 secret surveillance requests by the Bush administration, rejecting none. It also finds that the frequency of the administration's invocation of the "state secrets" privilege - 22 times in the past 4 years - is almost twice as high as the average of claims made to the privilege in the past 24 years. AP has more.

[JURIST] The ruling military junta in Myanmar [JURIST news archive] will resume negotiations for a new constitution [JURIST report] in the second week of October, junta spokesman Lt. Gen. Thein Sein announced Saturday. The constitutional convention was suspended on January 31 [JURIST report], with delegates postponing talks until the end of the year to allow farmers to cultivate their harvests. While delegates have met intermittently to compose a new constitution since 1993, Sein said in late July that the constitution is 75 percent complete, and that the parties had agreed on the basic principles of the new constitution.

The constitutional convention is the first step in a seven-stage road map that the government says is aimed at unification, democracy and free elections. Critics see the convention as a ploy [JURIST report] to enable the junta to stay in power. The main opposition party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) is not participating, despite winning a landslide victory in general elections in 1990. NLD pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi [advocacy website; BBC profile], still under a recently-extended house arrest [JURIST report], has been banned from attending the convention. Myanmar has been without a constitution since 1988, when the military suspended the existing 1974 charter [text] in response to mass pro-democracy protests. AP has more.

[JURIST] A Lebanese prosecutor Saturday charged six suspects - four held in Lebanon and two in Germany - with attempted murder after they were arrested in connection with a plot to blow up trains in Germany [BBC report] one month ago. The two suspects held in Germany, a Lebanese and a Syrian, were charged by the Lebanese prosecutor in absentia. Allegedly fueled by the publication of cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad [JURIST news archive], the terrorists planted bombs inside suitcases which were left on trains at Cologne station; investigations show that the detonators went off but failed to ignite the bombs.

The Lebanese prosecutor's decision to charge the suspects signaled to Germany that Lebanon [JURIST news archive] would not extradite the four men held in Lebanon, despite a recent meeting in Beirut between German and Lebanese intelligence and security officials aimed at seeking extradition. Germany [JURIST news archive] is anxious to try the suspected terrorists, and German lawmakers have already put forward new anti-terror measures [JURIST report] in the wake of the plot. The International Herald Tribune has more.