The semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq has adopted the "Kurdistan Oil and Gas Law" after KRG Prime Minister Nechervan Idris Barzani signed legislation Tuesday that will allow the Kurdish government to control its own oil resources and select its own foreign investors. The Kurdish government says that the law, passed by the Kurdistan National [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled Tuesday that terminally ill patients do not have a constitutional right to use experimental drugs that have passed limited safety trials but have not been proven safe and effective under requirements from the Food and Drug Administration . According to the appeals court, [...]

A lawyer for the Palestinian doctor jailed and allegedly tortured with five Bulgarian nurses for allegedly purposely infecting children with HIV in Libya said Tuesday that he intends to file a complaint with the UN Human Rights Committee against Libya for the abuse Ashraf Alhajouj says he suffered while in detention. Alhajouj's lawyer told Reuters [...]

The defense in the Jose Padilla terror trial rested its case Tuesday without Padilla's lawyers calling any witnesses. Padilla did not testify in the trial, nor did co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi . Jurors heard testimony from six witnesses called by lawyers representing Padilla's co-defendants, but Padilla's lawyers said last week that [...]

China has not kept its promises to improve human rights and press freedom in preparation for the 2008 Olympics slated to open next August in Beijing, according to a new report released Tuesday by Amnesty International . Amnesty said that the Chinese government had recently committed an increasing number of rights abuses against political and [...]

Abagail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs and Washington Legal Foundation v. Andrew von Eschenbach, In his official capacity as Commissioner, Food and Drug Administration, et al., US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, August 7, 2007 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled Monday that the state of California acted unconstitutionally by threatening criminal prosecution and shutting down websites that incorporated vote-swapping mechanisms prior to the 2000 US presidential election, holding that the "websites' vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutional [...]

The Hanoi People's Court on Tuesday convicted nine defendants, including three former Vietnamese government officials, of gambling and bribery charges . Bui Tien Deng, a former project management head in the Ministry of Transportation , was sentenced to 13 years in prison for placing bets totaling $760,000 on European soccer matches and subsequently attempting to [...]

Ukraine became the first Eastern European country to offer its jails to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) on Tuesday, as the two bodies signed an enforcement of sentences agreement under which Ukraine agreed to imprison convicted criminals in the country. Until Tuesday, only the Western European countries of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, [...]

The Basmanny District Court in Moscow issued a new arrest warrant Tuesday for exiled business tycoon Boris Berezovsky on charges that he allegedly embezzled an additional $13 million in credit funds from SBS-Agro Bank , which he then owned, to purchase real estate in southern France. The UK has already denied repeated requests from Russia [...]