[JURIST] The Taiwanese Central Election Commission [official website] said Saturday that two national referendums [JURIST report] on whether to proceed with a proposed bid for United Nations (UN) [official website] membership have failed. The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) [party website], headed by outgoing Taiwanese President Chen Shui-Bian, put forth one of the referendums which sought reinstatement to the UN under Taiwan's own name as a means of asserting the island's independence. The other referendum, supported by the opposing Kuomintang [party website; Global Security backgrounder], would have sought membership for the country under its official name, the Republic of China, or another unspecified alternative. Neither proposal received the roughly 8.5 million votes required to pass.

The referendums were held in conjunction with Taiwan's national presidential elections on Saturday. Former Kuomintang party chairman Ma Ying-jeou received about 58 percent of the popular vote to defeat the DPP candidate and win the presidency. Taiwan [JURIST news archive] was kicked out of the UN by General Assembly Resolution 2758 [PDF text] and replaced by the People's Republic of China [JURIST news archive] as the representative of China in 1971. Taiwan has applied for reinstatement to the UN for each of the last 15 years though each application for membership has been rejected [JURIST report]. AP has more.

[JURIST] Hundreds of Bangladesh veterans who took part in the 1971 War of Independence [Global Security backgrounder] issued a call Friday for war crimes trials against those Bangladeshis who assisted Pakistani forces in the war. Veterans and commanders from the war gathered in the city of Dhaka, under the banner of the Bangladesh Liberation War Sector Commanders' Forum [advocacy website], to urge Bangladesh's interim government [JURIST report] to at least initiate the tribunals. Among those included in the call are leaders of Bangladesh's largest political party, Jamaat-e-Islami [party website], who at the time of the war, opposed the separation of Pakistan. To this day the party has said that there was not a war of independence in 1971, instead calling it a civil war and denying any involvement. A possible reason for the timing of the demands is that the veterans want to ban Jamaat-e-Islami from taking part in the elections that are to be held in December. Top interim government officials have said that it is too busy with other issues, including the year-end elections, to respond to the war crimes issue.

According to government records, around three million people were killed during the war. Bangladesh has never held trials for war crimes as earlier governments have said that trials would harm national unity. BBC News has more. The Khaleej Times has additional coverage.

[JURIST] The Office of Serbia's War Crimes Prosecutor [official website] said Friday that it is investigating "informal statements" it has received from investigators at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) [official website] that dozens of imprisoned Serbs were killed by Albanian rebels in 1999 so that their organs could be used in an international trafficking operation. Former ICTY chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte [BBC backgrounder; JURIST news archive] will reportedly release a book in early April alleging approximately 300 Serbs were killed for organ trafficking. In discussions in The Hague on Thursday [press release], current ICTY chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz [official profile] and the Serbian delegation focused on the importance of cooperation among the states in ongoing efforts to bring fugitives to justice but the ICTY has not commented officially on the alleged organ trafficking. AP has more.

Brammertz took over the court's leadership in January, saying that he would continue his predecessor's tough stance on Serbian cooperation [JURIST report] with the tribunal. During her tenure as chief prosecutor, Del Ponte often criticized Serbia for its apparent reluctance to cooperate with the ICTY. The EU has made Serbia's cooperation with the ICTY a key element of its membership negotiations [EU accession materials].

[JURIST] US Attorney General Michael Mukasey [official profile] said Friday that he was willing to compromise with Congress on legislation amending the Foreign Intelligence Security Act [text; JURIST news archive] but that the legislature would have to provide a "workable bill". Mukasey said that the bill passed [JURIST report] by the US House of Representatives last week, which did not provide retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the NSA warrantless surveillance program [JURIST news archive], did not meet this threshold. Last month, the Senate passed [JURIST report] a version of the bill that did provide retroactive immunity to the companies. Mukasey stopped short of urging the House to adopt that version of the bill, however, and instead expressed hope that a compromise could be reached between the House bill and the Bush administration, which supports the immunity provision.

Mukasey's comments come roughly a week after President Bush said again that he would veto any FISA amendment legislation that did not include the immunity provision [transcript]. The House bill would defer the issue of immunity to the courts [JURIST report] to be resolved on a case-by-case basis, but would also allow the cases to be heard in closed-door hearings. Last month, Mukasey and US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said that vital intelligence had been lost [JURIST report] while telecommunications companies circumvented wiretapping orders as they waited for word on whether the immunity provision would be included in the new legislation. Mukasey said that the relationship between the private companies and the government had since been repaired and that intelligence gathering activities were now running smoothly. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] Ousted Pakistani Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry [JURIST news archive] has characterized Pakistan's February parliamentary elections which resulted in the victory of opposition parties now joined in a coalition government as a popular verdict in favor of the country's constitution, abrogated in November when President Pervez Musharraf proclaimed emergency rule in the country and deposed its superior court judges. Speaking Thursday by phone to a meeting of the Lahore Bar Association, Chaudhry said that Pakistan's judiciary is no longer under pressure since "the people have rejected the dictatorship and supported independent judges." According to a report [text] Friday by Pakistani newspaper Dawn, Chaudhry went on to say that the former Supreme Court's November 3 decision against the declaration of emergency rule [proclamation, PDF; JURIST report] and the Provisional Constitutional Order (PCO) [text as amended] is still authoritative.

A decision violative of the Constitution, neither has constitutional and legal significance nor required a fiat for setting it aside. It should be ignored completely... the SC in its decision had restrained superior court judges from taking the oath under the PCO. Therefore, the judges who took the oath under the PCO on Nov 3 could not undo the verdict of the seven-members bench against the Nov 3 emergency."