The Darfur Peace and Accountability Act of 2006 received near-unanimous approval by the US House of Representatives Wednesday evening. The bill, if approved by the Senate and signed by the president, would deny entry to the US and freeze the assets of those responsible for committing genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity in Sudan's [...]

527 Reform Act of 2006, passed by the US House of Representatives April 5, 2006 . Read the full text of the bill. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The Saddam Hussein trial continued Thursday in Baghdad with testimony from Awad al-Bandar , the head of the Revolutionary Court who sentenced 148 Shiites to death in 1984 . Al-Bandar, one of the seven co-defendants on trial with Hussein at the Iraqi High Criminal Court , took the stand for the second time Thursday, and [...]

The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed the 527 Reform Act of 2006 , legislation that would require non-profit political groups, called "527s" for the tax code section under which they are organized, to register as political committees and follow campaign finance rules . 527 groups currently are not subject to the same soft-money [...]

The Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a criminal investigation into management by British Petroleum of oil pipelines in Alaska, according to a report in Thursday's Wall Street Journal. A corroded pipeline owned by the company spilled an estimated 134,000 to 267,000 gallons of crude oil in March, the largest spill ever in Alaskan history . [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Bill Hing of UC Davis School of Law says that immigration legislation now being debated in Congress presents lawmakers with a moral choice, and that in its own economic, social, and national security interests it's time for the United States to do the right thing… If anti-immigrant forces in Congress have their [...]

A New Jersey state court jury on Wednesday rendered a split verdict after two days of deliberations in a joint trial that pitted two state residents who took the painkiller Vioxx against New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant Merck . The jury found that Merck did not warn either of the men of potential dangers of heart [...]

US District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled in Alexandria, Virginia, Wednesday that jurors in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui will be allowed to hear the cockpit tape and read the transcript of United Airlines Flight 93 , hijacked and downed in Pennsylvania on September 11 . Brinkema suggested that the recording, which has so [...]

The Belarus government has charged close to 600 people who participated in the protests that followed the March 19 presidential election that returned incumbent president Alexander Lukashenko to a third term in a landslide, according to Belarus prosecutor general Pyotr Miklashevich on Wednesday. Last week, Miklashevich indicated that there would be trials for the protesters [...]

French judicial officials have begun an investigation of the 172 French companies implicated in the UN oil-for-food scandal by the October 2005 report of the UN Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) chaired by former US Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. French magistrate Philippe Courroye, who has been probing French involvement in the scandal for three years, [...]