A lawyer for Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, a medical officer in the UK's Royal Air Force , argued in a pre-trial military hearing Wednesday that his client was entitled to say in a court-martial defense against five charges of failing to comply with an order to serve in Iraq that the Iraq war was illegal. [...]

AP is reporting that the UN General Assembly has approved a resolution creating a new Human Rights Council by a 170-4 vote, despite US opposition. The new rights body will replace the widely criticized Commission on Human Rights . General Assembly President Jan Eliasson's proposal reflected months of negotiations between UN member countries, but the [...]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) monitored gatherings organized by the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Justice , an anti-war activist organization based in Pittsburgh, according to documents released Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) . The ACLU contends that the FBI based its investigation solely on the organization's political views, particularly [...]

In an unpublicized 18-page document circulated last year by National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley , the Bush administration altered the Adjudicative Guidelines for Determining Eligibility for Access to Classified Information , making changes which could allow the federal government to use sexual orientation as a factor in denying clearances to applicants. Under the old version [...]

The president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has directed the court's Trial Chamber to consider varying or lifting protective measures applied to certain materials in the case against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in order to assist Dutch authorities and the Tribunal's own team investigating the circumstances of Milosevic's death. Tribunal [...]

Saddam Hussein formally testified in his own defense for the first time Wednesday at his trial in Iraq, calling the Iraqi High Criminal Court a "comedy" before the hearing was closed to the public. Chief Judge Ra'uf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman closed the courtroom after Hussein called on Iraqis to put an end to sectarian violence and [...]

Acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Wednesday that Israel plans to put a group of Palestinian prisoners on trial for the 2001 killing of an Israeli tourism minister. The men were seized after Israeli forces stormed a Palestinian prison in the West Bank Tuesday. Olmert vowed that the men will be "indicted according to [...]

More than 1,500 US federal judges have requested government-paid home security systems approved by Congress last year, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday. After a man broke into the home of District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow and murdered her husband and mother last March, the Judicial Conference of the United States , the policymaking board [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Shane of Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, says that the Bush Administration’s proposed Line-Item Veto Act has only two problems: first, it proposes to create power the President pretty much already has, and second, it is not a line-item veto… Perhaps this kind of misrepresentation matters only to constitutional [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Faris Sanabani, Publisher of the English-language Yemen Observer newspaper currently facing calls by Yemeni prosecutors for permanent shutdown, confiscation, and even the death penalty against its Chief Editor for republishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, explains why – and how – his paper reprinted the Danish cartoons, and tells the remarkable [...]