The Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) and Maoist rebels are violating international human rights laws , according to a new report released by the UN's Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) Thursday. The OHCHR-Nepal report outlines the investigation of activities in Nepal since last April and reveals conflicts in populated areas that have [...]

Iraq's Interior Ministry Thursday announced an investigation into claims that a police death squad has been operating in Iraq, either working for, or claiming to work for the ministry itself. The US military says it recently detained 22 men in police uniforms who were about to kill a Sunni man. Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, the [...]

Rene Preval became the president-elect of Haiti Thursday after the interim government and the Provisional Election Council (CEP) reached an agreement allowing him to exceed the necessary 50.1 percent of the majority of votes in the country's February 7 election . The agreement subtracted approximately 85,000 blank ballots from the total number of votes cast, [...]

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) , chairman of the US House Judiciary Committee, has complained of bias in a recent report of the Congressional Research Service on the NSA domestic spying program . In a letter written last week he said that a CRS study released in early January suggesting that the legal justification for the [...]

Situation of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Report of the Chairperson of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, UN Commission on Human Rights, February 16, 2005. Excerpt: The Chairperson of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention and the Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers are deeply concerned about the legal regime applied by [...]

Leading Thursday's international brief, the civilian criminal trial of Ugandan opposition leader Dr. Kizza Besigye and his 22 co-defendants has been postponed until after the upcoming national elections in Uganda. Ugandan Deputy Director for Public Prosecutions Simon Byabakama Mugenyi was forced to ask for a continuance after Besigye's defense lawyers challenged the government's indictment as [...]

In an interview on the Fox News Channel Wednesday, US Vice President Dick Cheney said that while he may be called as a witness in the CIA leak case and therefore could not comment specifically on it, he does have authority under executive order to declassify government secrets. The comment has increased speculation that Cheney's [...]

Recently released photographs and video showing the apparent abuse of prisoners by US personnel at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison show clear violations of international humanitarian law, a spokeswoman for International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Thursday. The previously unpublished images , shown on Australian television Wednesday, were taken around the same time as [...]

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov Wednesday told the Duma , Russia's lower house, that Russian society was to blame for instances of military conscript abuse and hazing that have scandalized the country. He particularly faulted television and the media for contributing to a "decline of traditional values" and pointed to a "culture of abuse" that [...]

The European Union (EU) is voicing reservations about human rights in Belarus in the wake of a growing number of reports of abuses there. At the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Austrian State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Hans Winkler commented that next month's elections in the country are unlikely to bring "sweeping change" and [...]