Zimbabwean lawyers Monday appealed for the release of several hundred opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) members detained after police raids on Friday, saying that the the MDC members were being held in defiance of a court order. Witnesses say that police were searching for vote counting materials that might show that MDC candidate Morgan [...]

Ali Khan : "Pakistan's ruling Coalition has less than forty-eight hours left to fulfill their pre-election promise with the nation to restore the high court judges that General Musharraf fired by means of the 2007 Emergency Proclamation last November, an action contrary to the Constitution. The country's lawyers are likely to protest hard and refuse [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday let stand Indiana's controversial voter identification statute , which requires voters to present photo identification as a prerequisite to voting. The decision comes in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board , where the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the law in 2007, ruling that it [...]

The US Justice Department told a member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee that abusive or humiliating interrogations of terror suspects ostensibly prohibited by the common article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on "outrages upon personal dignity" might be permissible if "undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation [...]

Farzana Hassan and Tarek Fatah : "How long will it take the leadership of North America's traditional Muslim leadership to embrace the First amendment of the United Sates constitution and the doctrine of the separation of religion and state? Will the concept of freedom of expression survive ever-new challenges from the defenders of medieval traditions [...]

Faisal Naseem Chaudhry : "On April 22, a delegation of Lahore-based lawyers called on deposed Pakistan Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry at his residence in the capital Islamabad. Since many could had wished to become part of the delegation, the leaders of the Bar Association kept the visit quite secret. Luckily, the brother-in-law of the [...]

ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo on Saturday called on the government of Sudan to arrest and surrender two war crimes suspects wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) . In a statement noting that arrest warrants for the two suspects – former Sudanese Minister of the Interior Ahmed Muhammad Harun and former militia leader Ali [...]

Ugandan police arrested three journalists Saturday as part of an investigation into suspected sedition, according to the journalists' lawyer. The journalists worked on two articles published in the Independent magazine that were critical of the Ugandan military. Formal charges have not yet been filed, but the journalists' lawyer said that they have been accused of [...]

Opposition members of the Mexican Congress have ended their protest against a proposed energy reform bill backed by Mexican President Felipe Calderon , after the ruling party agreed to allow further debate on the bill. Members of Mexico's Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) and several smaller parties had staged a 15-day sit-in over their objections to [...]

The US Senate Judiciary Committee has approved the State Secrets Protection Act , sending the legislation to the Senate floor for consideration. The legislation, approved by a 11-8 vote on Thursday, would place restrictions on when the executive can assert the so-called state secrets privilege in lawsuits involving the federal government. According to the Congressional [...]