Iranian-American journalist Parnaz Azima has been granted permission to leave Iran after months of being held in the country due to security-related charges against her, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) said Tuesday. Azima, employed by a Persian service of RFE/RL, originally traveled to Iran in January to visit her sick mother, and upon arrival Iranian [...]

EU Justice, Freedom, and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini said Wednesday that the European Union will move forward with plans to establish an EU-wide airline passenger data recording system despite privacy concerns because the threat posed by terror attacks remains high. Frattini's comments came on the same day that German authorities announced the arrests of three [...]

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is investigating whether to move the war crimes trial of Congolese militia leader Thomas Lubanga to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) , ICC judge Adrian Fulford said Tuesday. The announcement was made at pretrial hearings held at the ICC at The Hague, and comes more than a month after [...]

A Malaysian judge has ruled that a five-year marriage between two local citizens is void, after finding that the husband is actually a woman, according to a local report on Tuesday. The judge made his ruling after a physician conducted an examination on the husband, concluding that she was in fact a woman. The couple [...]

Russia has appointed a new lead prosecutor to investigate the October 2006 killing of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya , according to a statement from the Prosecutor General's office Tuesday. Control over the investigation was handed to Sergei Ivanov in a move that Politkovskaya's former colleagues at the newspaper Novaya Gazeta say is evidence of political [...]

Washington DC Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and DC Attorney General Linda Singer Tuesday formally appealed a March federal court ruling invalidating the District of Columbia's handgun ban to the US Supreme Court, setting the stage for the biggest Second Amendment challenge in almost 70 years. In March, the US Court of Appeals for the DC [...]

Belgian prosecutor Jean-Claude Van Espen said Tuesday that the Church of Scientology should be classified as a criminal organization after completing a 10-year investigation into the church's activities. Van Espen also recommended that the Church and a dozen of its adherents should face criminal charges of fraud and extortion in Belgium , where the Church [...]

Officials in Norway have indicted three men on terrorism-related charges, according to a statement by the national prosecutor Tuesday. The three men were indicted for their alleged roles in the September 2006 shooting at an Oslo synagogue and in planning attacks on the US and Israeli embassies in Norway. A trial date has not yet [...]

US government secrecy increased in 2006, according to the Secrecy Report Card 2007 released over the weekend by OpenTheGovernment.org . The report cited an increased reliance on national security letters (NSL) and more frequent assertions of the state secrets privilege. The fourth-annual report also examined other indicators of secrecy in the federal government such as [...]

Secrecy Report Card 2007, OpenTheGovernment.org, September 1, 2007 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.