A former Iraqi judge on trial with Saddam Hussein testified Monday in Baghdad that he sentenced 148 Shiites to death after a 1982 assassination attempt on the former dictator in the town of Dujail, but asserted that they were given a proper trial beforehand. Awad al-Bandar led the Revolutionary Court when the 148 were sentenced. [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Neil Kinkopf of Georgia State University College of Law says that the broad interpretations of presidential power under statute being offered by defenders of the President's domestic surveillance program threaten to undercut the constitutional balance of power and even basic democratic values… The Bush Administration’s domestic surveillance program has been the subject [...]

The annual six-week meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva was suspended after just four minutes on Monday to give the 191 member governments of the UN General Assembly more time to debate and discuss a replacement body. The 53-member commission, supposed to be meeting for the last time, agreed Friday to [...]

A member of the elite Special Air Service special forces of the British Army who refused to return to Iraq and later left British military service said in an interview published in the UK Sunday that he resigned because he objected to the illegality of the war and its tactics, especially as conducted by US [...]

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi called Italy's judiciary “the disease of our democracy” in a weekend TV interview, promising changes to the judicial system as he himself faces the possibility of a new trial before upcoming parliamentary elections scheduled for April 9-10. The combative conservative politician has long blamed supposedly left-leaning magistrates for his many legal [...]

Resolution relating to the censure of George W. Bush, Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), March 12, 2006 . Read the full text of the resolution. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The 53-member UN Commission on Human Rights is set to start its yearly and probably last six-week session in Geneva on Monday, but may not follow its customary agenda due to ongoing controversy over the formation of a new UN Human Rights Council intended to replace it as part of an ongoing series of UN [...]

Wire services are reporting that initial results of an autopsy cited by an ICTY official at The Hague ahead of the public release of the findings indicate that Slobodan Milosevic died of "classical heart failure". Milosevic had a long history of heart trouble and his health had forced multiple delays of his trial. The autopsy [...]

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) said Sunday on ABC's This Week that he plans to introduce a censure resolution in the US Senate Monday condemning President Bush for approving the National Security Agency warrantless wiretapping program and then misinforming the public about the program's existence and legality. Feingold has argued that the program is in direct [...]

A new investigatory report by the Associated Press shows an increasing trend among state legislatures to restrict access to information that was public before the 9/11 attacks. Security concerns were found to be the main driving force for state action, but concerns about identity theft, medical privacy and computer vulnerability to attack also drove legislatures. [...]