United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for the United States to close its Guantanamo Bay detention facility as soon as possible, reiterating the conclusions of a 54 page report released Thursday by a UN-appointed independent panel. Annan said:There is a lot in the report, and I cannot say that I necessarily agree with everything [...]
The Republican leaders of two key Congressional committees said Thursday that they would not undertake direct probes of the president's NSA warrantless surveillance program . The US House Intelligence Committee said it would conduct a review of federal surveillance laws but its members are already disagreeing about the scope of their inquiry. Rep. Heather Wilson [...]
Leading Friday's international brief, four high profile Egyptian judges who spoke out against fellow colleagues accused of rigging votes in last year's presidential elections have been stripped of judicial immunity and are scheduled to be questioned by Egyptian police officials on charges of slander against government officials. The judges, including the deputy judge of the [...]
A UK High Court judge has ruled that three UK residents detained by the US at Guantanamo Bay since 2002 can seek a court order requiring the British government to petition the US government for their release. The UK government has thusfar said that it cannot represent non-British citizens at the camp, even if they [...]
As ongoing unrest stemming from the controversy over the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad continues, Pakistani police on Friday placed radical Islamic leader Hafiz Mohammad Saeed under house arrest to prevent him from giving his usual Friday sermon at a mosque in Lahore. Saeed is the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militia, which has been designated [...]
JURIST Special Guest Columnist Brian Concannon Jr., Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, says that the negotiated deal over the counting of disputed ballots which has made Rene Preval the president-elect of Haiti has correctly put the most popular candidate in office but has done so at considerable cost to his [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Shane of Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, says that decisions by the Republican leaders of two congressional committees not to launch probes into warrantless NSA surveillance of Americans contrary to FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, reflect a serious breakdown in the constitutional system of checks and balances between [...]
Sheriff's officials in Los Angeles have said they intend to pursue criminal charges against at least two dozen inmates who participated in a series of racially motivated riots in early February at the North County Correctional Facility . Two people have been killed in the violence and over 100 inmates have been injured in a [...]
A Belgian court has convicted three men for being members of an Islamic group connected to terror attacks in Casablanca in May 2003 and Madrid in March 2004. The men were on trial for their alleged membership in a Belgian cell of the militant Moroccan Islamist Combatant Group (GICM) . The case was the first [...]
The UN High Commission on Refugees has expressed alarm at Ukraine's deportation of 10 Uzbek asylum-seekers to Uzbekistan where they may face torture and abuse, alleging the deportations violated international law. An eleventh detainee was kept in Ukraine because he has relatives there. Nine of the eleven men had registered with UNHCR office in Kiev [...]