[JURIST] The European Commission (EC) [official website] announced Thursday that it has filed additional antitrust charges against microprocessor manufacturer Intel [corporate website] for anti-competitive actions it has allegedly taken against rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) [corporate websites]. In a Supplementary Statement of Objections (SSO), the EC said that Intel had provided "substantial" rebates to one computer retailer on the condition that it only use Intel processors, and that it had both paid a computer manufacturer to delay selling AMD-based devices and offered the manufacturer similar exclusivity rebates. The EC announced [press release] that Intel has eight weeks to respond to the complaint:

Each of the conducts outlined in the 26 July 2007 Statement of Objections and the SSO is provisionally considered to constitute an abuse of a dominant position in its own right. However, the Commission also considers at this stage of its analysis that all the types of conduct reinforce each other and are part of a single overall anti-competitive strategy aimed at excluding AMD or limiting its access to the market.

[JURIST] Serbian prosecutors confirmed on Friday that they are gathering evidence for a case against an alleged World War II Nazi guard currently living in the United States. Peter Egner, 86, has admitted to serving in the Nazi-run Security Police and Security Service, a unit which is believed to have taken part in the killings of over 17,000 people in the area surrounding German-occupied Belgrade. On Tuesday, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a complaint [PDF text; JURIST report] in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington [official website], seeking to revoke Egner's US citizenship. Egner became a US citizen in 1966 but failed to disclose his Nazi service on his citizenship application. The DOJ argued that he was ineligible for citizenship both because of his service and because he concealed that information on his application. AP has more.

Also Friday, the Spanish National Court granted a petition [JURIST report] by rights group Equipo Nizkor [advocacy website] to hear a case against four former Nazi officers for alleged war crimes committed during World War II. The suit was brought on behalf of a concentration camp survivor and families of three who died at the camp. Under Spanish law, the country's courts can exercise universal jurisdiction [HRW backgrounder] to try those suspected of genocide and other serious human rights offenses even if they occur abroad. The four named in the suit, Johann Leprich [DOJ press release; JURIST report], Anton Tittjung [AP report], Josias Kumpf [DOJ press release] and John Demjanjuk [JURIST news archive], are currently in the US under deportation orders. AP has more.

[JURIST] Former US Attorney General John Ashcroft [official profile] testified [C-Span video, flash; prepared statement, PDF] before the House Judiciary Committee [official website] Thursday, defending advice the Department of Justice (DOJ) gave the Bush administration on the legality of certain interrogation methods used on terrorism suspects. Ashcroft had been called before the committee to testify on his involvement with 2002 and 2003 [PDF texts; JURIST report] so-called "torture memos" provided to the White House by the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) [official website]. Ashcroft said that the original rules adopted by the administration were too broad, but that they were later revised and were never intended as a way to circumvent constitutional or legal protections:

The Administration’s continual— indeed, almost obsessive—quest for legal guidance and specific authorization for measures necessitated by the War on Terror is evidence of a government striving to keep within the limits of law, not one seeking to ignore or evade those limits. I make no claim that the Department’s analyses of the difficult legal questions that arose during my tenure as Attorney General— questions often at the edges of our law—were always flawless, nor that our conclusions were always free from doubt. No Administration can lay claim to such a feat; nor can the oft-divided Supreme Court, which reverses itself, from time to time, on issues of the greatest national importance. I can and do claim, however, that as Attorney General I sought to ensure that the legal advice provided by the Department adhered to the highest professional standards of quality and integrity.

[JURIST] Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi [BBC profile; JURIST news archive] on Thursday was denied his request to replace the presiding judge at his ongoing corruption trial [JURIST report]. Berlusconi's legal team claimed [ANSA report] that judge Nicoletta Gandus was biased after she commented on laws passed by the previous Berlusconi government. They also argued that she had a vested interest in another trial involving Berlusconi because she previously owned shares of Berlusconi's broadcasting company, Mediaset [corporate website]. Berlusconi faces charges of corruption arising from his alleged payment of $600,000 to his former lawyer David Mills for favorable testimony at trials in the 1990s. DPA has more.

Last month, Gandus said that hearings in the case would continue [JURIST report] despite the request for her removal. Also last month, Berlusconi suggested that proposed changes to Italian law [PDF text, in Italian] designed to suspend older trials for nonviolent crimes would allow the country's judiciary to consider more important cases [Senate letter, in Italian] and would give the government time to introduce judicial reforms. The changes would protect high-ranking government officials from prosecution during their terms in office. Critics of the proposal have charged that the move is personally motivated since Berlusconi's trial would be among those suspended. Berlusconi has faced trial on at least six occasions involving charges of embezzlement, false accounting, tax fraud, money laundering, and giving false testimony [JURIST reports] involving Mediaset.

[JURIST] International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo [official profile] said Thursday that he will widen his investigation into war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region [JURIST news archive] to include attacks by rebel groups against African Union (AU) [official website] peacekeeping forces. Speaking at a press conference [UN News report] during celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the Rome Statute [PDF text], which created the ICC, Moreno-Ocampo said, "Any attack against peacekeepers is a crime under my jurisdiction." Moreno-Ocampo also indicated that his office is reviewing evidence related to such incidents, and now knows the identity of two rebel commanders who initiated the September 2007 attack on AU peacekeepers [NYT report] in the Darfur town of Haskanita. The New York Times has more. BBC News has additional coverage.

On Monday, Moreno-Ocampo applied for an arrest warrant [application, PDF; JURIST report] for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir [BBC profile; JURIST news archive] on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes for atrocities committed in Darfur. The Sudanese government has already rejected the ICC's jurisdiction and has refused to surrender two previously-named war crimes suspects [JURIST report]. Hundreds of thousands of people have allegedly been killed in Darfur by Sudanese military and janjaweed [Slate backgrounder] militia forces. The investigation that resulted in Monday's charges, which involved more than 100 witnesses in 18 countries, led Moreno-Ocampo to state before the UN Security Council [official website] in June that “evidence shows that the commission of such crimes on such a scale, over a period of five years, and throughout Darfur, has required the sustained mobilization of the entire Sudanese state apparatus.” The Security Council has repeatedly called on Sudan to comply with the ICC investigation, but Sudan has refused to do so, calling Moreno-Ocampo a "terrorist" [JURIST reports] and suggesting that he should be removed from office.

[JURIST] A US district court judge on Thursday rejected a bid [PDF text] to stay the trial of Guantanamo Bay detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan [DOD materials; JURIST news archive], ruling that a civilian court should refrain from review until the military commission had issued a "final judgment." Hamdan's lawyers had argued [motion, PDF; memorandum, PDF] that the military trial should be postponed until the court rules on the jurisdiction and legality of Hamdan's military commission, but the Department of Justice responded [JURIST report] that Boumediene v. Bush [opinion, PDF; JURIST report] only gave detainees the right to challenge their detention, not to challenge their trials once they became defendants. In his written opinion released on Friday, Judge James Robertson explained:

Hamdan's focus now is not on post-trial habeas, of course. What he seeks is pre-trial relief to avoid being subjected to a trial that, in his submission, will be unlawful. His claims of unlawfulness, however, are all claims that should or must be decided in the first instance by the Military Commission, and then raised before the DC Circuit, as necessary, on appeal. The Supreme Court's decision in Councilman requires federal courts to give "due respect to the autonomous military judicial system created by Congress." Councilman involved courtmartial proceedings against a US service member, to be sure, and not a military commission, but its central rationale is applicable here. Councilman requires the courts to respect the balance that Congress has struck in creating a military justice system, "a critical element of which is the Court of Military Appeals consisting of civilian judges completely removed from all military influence or persuasion." [citations omitted]

[JURIST] Belgian King Albert II [official website] declined to accept the resignation [press release, in Dutch] of Prime Minister Yves Leterme [personal website, in Dutch; JURIST report] on Thursday. Leterme submitted his resignation Monday night because of his coalition government's inability to successfully divide federal powers between the Flemish- and French-speaking communities. King Albert II also announced a commission, consisting of one German-speaking and two French-speaking senior politicians, tasked with facilitating talks on constitutional reform. The group will report on its progress at the end of July. AFP has more. BBC News has additional coverage.

Leterme had set a deadline of July 15 for the four-month-old coalition [founding text, PDF, in Dutch] to agree on constitutional reforms to grant increased autonomy to the two regions. Leterme said that the current federation system of Dutch government [official backgrounder] was incapable of solving the problem, since the wealthier Flemish region wanted even greater autonomy and the Francophone region maintained that the Flemish move was meant to completely separate itself from the rest of the country.

[JURIST] The Bush administration abandoned plans to impose Clean Air Act (CAA) [text] regulations on power plants and other stationary pollution sources after opposition from the oil industry, according to a report [PDF text; press release] released Friday by the House Select Committee on Global Warming [official website]. Based on interviews [transcript, PDF] with former EPA official Jason Burnett, the committee found that there was early widespread support within both the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) [official website] and the Bush administration for extending the scope of existing environmental regulations, but that the White House reversed its approach after lobbying by oil companies:

The oil industry argued against regulatory action, and had the support of the Office of Vice President Cheney. In developing its proposals to make a positive endangerment finding and to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions from both vehicles and stationary sources, EPA consulted with a wide range of environmental and industry stakeholders. Environmental stakeholders and, interestingly, some electric utility representatives, including the Edison Electric Institute (which represents the nation's major investor-owned utilities), agreed that it would be best for EPA to proceed with regulation of both vehicles and stationary sources using Clean Air Act authority. But others, including oil industry representatives from ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Petrochemicals and Refiners Association, adopted a "not on my watch" approach – arguing that such regulations would tarnish President Bush's conservative anti-regulatory legacy, and should be delayed until the next President took office. Those arguments were echoed, within the White House, by Vice President Cheney's energy adviser, F. Chase Hutto III.

Doing the oil industry's bidding, the Bush administration reversed course. After passage of the Energy Independence and Security Act in 2007, the arguments put forward by the oil industry representatives began to prevail in inter-agency and White House discussions on how to respond to the Massachusetts v. EPA decision. By March 2008, EPA announced that, instead of issuing proposals for a positive endangerment finding and regulations, it would move forward with a non-regulatory "Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking" (ANPR). By mid-April 2008, President Bush announced in a speech that "the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act were never meant to regulate global climate change," and went on to assert that Congress, not the Executive Branch, was responsible for deciding how to address greenhouse gas emissions.

[JURIST] Texas Governor Rick Perry [official website] said Thursday that Texas will go forward with the August 5 execution of a Mexican national despite an International Court of Justice (ICJ) [official website] order staying the execution [order and press release, PDF]. The ICJ ordered Wednesday that a mandated review be conducted to determine whether five Mexican nationals on death row in Texas were inappropriately denied the chance to speak with Mexican counselor officers in violation of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations [PDF text]. The court held:

The United States shall take all measures necessary to ensure that Jose Ernesto Medellin Rojas, Cesar Roberto Fierro Reyna, Ruben Ramirez Cardenas, Humberto Leal Garcia, and Roberto Moreno Ramos are not executed pending judgment on the Request for interpretation submitted by the United Mexican States, unless and until these five Mexican nationals receive review and reconsideration consistent with paragraphs 138 to 141 of the Court's Judgment delivered on 31 March 2004 in the case concerning Avena and Other Mexican Nationals (Mexico v. United States of America).

Texas has made clear that unless restrained, it will go forward with the execution without providing Mr. Medellin the mandated review and reconsideration and that such action by the Texas courts will thereby irreparably breach the United States obligations under the Avena judgment.

The world court [ICJ] has no standing in Texas and Texas is not bound by a ruling or edict from a foreign court. It is easy to get caught up in discussions of international law and justice and treaties. It's very important to remember that these individuals are on death row for killing our citizens.