JURIST Guest Columnist Margaret Satterthwaite of New York University School of Law says that US actions in the war on terror – especially the practice of extraordinary rendition – make a mockery of formal US insistence on the rule of law, damaging it and ultimately reducing it to nothing… Since 9/11, the U.S. government has [...]

Several hundred people led by Islamic clerics protested in Afghanistan Monday against the suggested release of a man who converted from Islam to Christianity. The religious leaders called for Abdul Rahman to be tried under Islamic sharia law which imposes the death penalty for anyone guilty of apostasy, or "abandonment of the faith." The protests [...]

US District Judge Ivan Lemelle will hold a hearing Monday to hear arguments from civil rights groups that the upcoming April 22 municipal elections in New Orleans should be postponed because many African-American residents have been displaced outside Louisiana due to Hurricane Katrina and will be unable to vote. Lemelle has already dismissed a challenge [...]

US troops in Iraq reportedly arrested more than 40 Iraqi Interior Ministry personnel Sunday after the discovery of a secret bunker complex in central Baghdad holding 17 foreign prisoners. In November 2005, some 170 Sunni detainees were found by Americans at a secret police prison in Baghdad, launching a nationwide investigation into allegations of widespread [...]

Newly-disclosed comments by US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made after a speech at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland earlier this month have touched off a furor in the lead-up to Tuesday's oral arguments in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld on the constitutionality of using military tribunals to try foreign terror suspects. Asked about the constitutional [...]

Key organizers of election protests in the Belarus capital city of Minsk who were detained by police will face criminal charges, Belarus Interior Minister Vladimir Naumov said Sunday. Thousands of citizens gathered Saturday to demonstrate against alleged election fraud in last Sunday's presidential elections in which incumbent Alexander Lukashenko was reelected to a third term. [...]

France's Interior Minister and anticipated 2007 French presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy has called for a compromise over a new youth labor law – the so-called First Employment Contract (contrat première embauche, CPE) – which among other things allows employers to fire at will employees under age 26 during the first two years of their employment. [...]

The UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) Sunday called on the Nigerian government to immediately detain former Liberian president and accused war criminal Charles Taylor so that he does not disappear before being handed over to the Liberian government to be tried for crimes against humanity by the Special Court. On Saturday, the Nigerian [...]

More than 500,000 pro-immigration activists took to the streets in Los Angeles on Saturday to protest Congressional efforts to crack down on illegal immigration . The protest came in anticipation of Senate debate on a reform bill sponsored by Majority Leader Bill Frist scheduled to begin Tuesday of this week if the US Senate Judiciary [...]

Afghan officials said Sunday they were preparing to release a man possibly facing the death penalty for converting to Christianity from Islam after a judge sent the case of Abdul Rahman back to prosecutors, ruling that he lacked enough evidence to proceed. The Afghanistan attorney-general's office indicated that Rahman could be freed while it reviewed [...]