[JURIST] Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad [official profile; BBC profile] should be brought to trial for inciting genocide against Christians and Jews during remarks he made last month, former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu [official website] said on Sunday. Ahmadinejad said at a two-day conference in Tehran [BBC report] in December that Israel's days were numbered, repeating previous calls for violence against the Jewish state. At a Palestinian conference last April, he said Israel “is heading toward annihilation”, dismissed the Holocaust as a "myth", and called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" [Guardian report], a statement which immediately drew international condemnation. Reuters has more.

In December, then-US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton [official profile] called for international criminal charges to be brought against Ahmadinejad [JURIST report] for the same reasons. Bolton, who was joined by former Israeli UN Ambassador Dore Gold [JCPA profile] and former Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General Irwin Cotler [official profile], said that Ahmadinejad's remarks violated the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide [text], which prohibits "direct and public incitement to commit genocide." Last spring, the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs reported that it was preparing a document [JURIST report] recommending a lawsuit against Ahmadinejad for his remarks. Israeli lawyer Eran Shahar, representing the civil rights group Civil Coalition, filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] against Ahmadinejad in Germany last February on charges of incitement and denying the existence of the World War II Holocaust.

[JURIST] Growing criticism [JURIST report] of the circumstances behind the Guantanamo detention of German-born Turk Murat Kurnaz [JURIST news archive] has focused on German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier [BBC profile] following German media reports over the weekend. Kurnaz, arrested by US officials in Pakistan shortly after September 11, was held at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] from 2002 to 2006 and released last August [JURIST report] in response to repeated appeals to US authorities by current German Chancellor Angela Merkel [official website, in German]. State television network ARD [media website] and the Süddeutsche Zeitung [media website] newspaper alleged [SZ report, in German] Sunday that documents from 2005 revealed that Steinmeier's office secretly solicited additional intelligence from the United States to actually strengthen terrorism charges against Kurnaz. ARD also reported that Germany refused a 2002 offer from the US to release Kurnaz. Steinmeier, who was chief of staff to former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder until the end of Schroeder's term in November 2005, has not commented on the allegations but will address a German parliamentary committee [ARD report] investigating Kurnaz's detention. Reuters has more.

Kurnaz has alleged he suffered abuse and torture [Deutsche Welle report] as a detainee at Guantanamo Bay; last October Germany began a probe [JURIST report] into the charges. Various German party political leaders are calling for Schroeder to face the legal consequences of his alleged complicity in allowing Kurnaz to languish in the detention facility for so long. Schroeder's Social Democrat party rejects the allegations. Kurnaz's lawyer acknowledges that a Greens party official in the then-governing coalition responded to the release offer in 2001, but Kurnaz's Turkish citizenship made it difficult for the government to arrange for his release.

[JURIST] One of the most complex criminal trials in Canadian legal history gets under way Monday in New Westminster, British Columbia, as Robert William Pickton [CBC case backgrounder] stands accused of murdering 26 women [indictment text], most of them prostitutes and drug addicts in the Vancouver area in the 1990s. The trial will focus on charges relating to six of these murders under Section 235 of the Canadian Criminal Code [text] after BC Supreme Court Justice James Williams decided last summer to divide the counts [CBC report] to avoid overburdening the jury. Pickton has pleaded not guilty to each charge. Pickton was arrested in 2002 after remains were discovered on his pig farm; preliminary hearings for the case have lasted over a year. The trial is also expected to be protracted, with prosecutors expected to call 240 witnesses.

Media frenzy around the case led to a publication ban [court documents] to avoid swaying potential jurors; the ban has been lifted for the trial. Currently the worst serial killer in Canadian history is Marc Lepine, who shot 14 women and himself in Montreal in 1989. AP has more.

[JURIST] The United Nations will work with Nepali leaders to bring human rights violators to justice, according to a statement [text] from UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour [official profile]. Arbour is on a six-day visit to the transitioning nation in conjunction with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Nepal (OHCHR-Nepal) [official website]. Arbour's visit will focus on the issues of

ending impunity for serious human rights violations, including the need to resolve all outstanding cases of disappearances; the need for a well-functioning law enforcement and criminal justice system as an essential means of strengthening human rights protection; and the need to address long-standing discrimination and social exclusion.

[JURIST] A former Nigeria [JURIST news archive] oil minister, Dan Etete, will stand trial in France to face money laundering charges, according to a report Sunday by the Journal du Dimanche [media website] newspaper. The money laundering is in connection with kickbacks suspected to have been paid by oil companies, including French company Elf-Aquitaine [Wikipedia backgrounder] and Canadian Addax Petroleum [corporate website], in exchange for drilling rights in Nigeria. Elf-Aquitaine, which is now a part of TotalFinaElf, was at the center of one of the largest judicial corruption inquiries in French history, which ended after seven years of investigations [DW report] in 2002. Three former executives were jailed in 2003 [Guardian report], after investigators suggested that around $530 million had been misappropriated by the company.

Etete, who served late Nigerian dictator Sani Abachafrom from 1993 to 1998 and now lives in England, has denied the charges. Investigations have swarmed around his numerous purchases of luxury properties in France, which totaled $19.5 million within a single year. Sunday's report said that the trial order was signed on Wednesday, but no date was mentioned. AFP has more.

The announcement of the trial is the latest in a string of corruption charges streaming out of Nigeria, with allegations [BBC report] being made both by and about senior political leaders. In the wake of new laws governing conduct in the Nigerian civil service a recent report [text] by Global Integrity, a DC based non-profit tracking governance and corruption trends worldwide, ranked Nigeria as "moderate", up from a "weak" integrity rating in 2004 [report text]. Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission reported last year that 31 of 36 Nigerian state governors are currently under investigation [VOA report] in an attempt to crack down on corruption [BBC report] domestically.

[JURIST] UK Home Secretary John Reid [official profile], the country's most senior justice official, has drawn up plans to split Britain's Home Office [official website] into two departments covering justice and security matters respectively, according to a reports published Sunday in British papers. The change would be the most drastic one made to the core government department since it was first established in 1782. The plans appear to have the support of the current Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, who argues that the current ministry is "not fit for the purpose."

In recent years, a series of blunders ranging from the mistaken release of foreign prisoners [JURIST report] to losing terror suspects subject to restrictive "control orders" [Independent report] has led critics to call for reform in the Home Office. Though they have advocated the creation of a separate minister for terrorism, the opposition Conservative Party has expressed concern that dividing the Home Office "may well create a whole new set of problems." The London Telegraph has more. The Guardian has additional coverage.

[JURIST] A UK House of Commons committee called Sunday for the British government to work with the United States to develop an alternative to the Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] prison and speed up its closure. The panel, seven of whose members visited the US facility in September last year, urged the government in an 83-page report [text, PDF] to "engage actively with the US administration and with the international community to assist the process of closing Guantanamo as soon as may be consistent with the overriding need to protect the public from terrorist threats."

The committee was sharply critical of US Guantanamo policy in several respects, concluding that "the facilities at Guantánamo are broadly comparable with those at the United Kingdom’s only maximum security detention facility, but the conditions are not. Guantánamo scores highly on diet and on health provision; but it fails to achieve minimum United Kingdom standards on access to exercise and recreation, to lawyers, and to the outside world through educational facilities and the media." More ominously, the panel found that "abuse of detainees at Guantánamo Bay has almost certainly taken place in the past, but we believe it is unlikely to be taking place now. Although violence and low-level abuse are endemic in any high-security prison situation, it is the duty of the detaining authority to strive to its utmost to minimise them. We recommend that the Government continue to raise with the United States authorities human rights concerns about the treatment of detainees." The committee also ventured that "in choosing unilaterally to interpret terms and provisions of the Geneva Conventions, the United States risks undermining this important body of international law." More generally it observed that:

the Geneva Conventions are failing to provide necessary protection because they lack clarity and are out of date. We recommend that the Government work with other signatories to the Geneva Conventions and with the International Committee of the Red Cross to update the Conventions in a way that deals more satisfactorily with asymmetric warfare, with international terrorism, with the status of irregular combatants, and with the treatment of detainees.