Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif has said that he plans to replace the country's 25-year-old emergency laws with anti-terror legislation. The emergency laws, renewed every three years, are set to expire in May. They were adopted in 1981 in response to the assassination of former President Anwar Sadat , and grant the government the power [...]

Early Friday morning local time, Belarus police swept down on hundreds of demonstrators camped out in Minsk's Oktyabrskaya Square in protest against the results of last Sunday's presidential elections which returned Alexander Lukashenko to power in Belarus with 82.6 percent of the vote, according to official results . After a scuffle with a few protestors [...]

After European Union foreign ministers met in Brussels Thursday to discuss the future of the EU Constitution , Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik has expressed doubt that a solution to the current impasse will be ready by a June summit on the constitution. Austria currently holds the EU presidency and has made reconsideration of the [...]

UN Legal Counsel Nicolas Michel said Thursday that the UN is ready to begin final negotiations on the establishment of an international tribunal to try suspects in the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri . Michel said that a mixed tribunal with both Lebanese and international support, similar to the Special [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Richard Seamon of the University of Idaho School of Law says that in light of ever-increasing evidence of detainee abuse by US personnel or parties acting with the approval or complicity of the United States, Congress should change federal law to create a civil remedy for victims of US-sanctioned torture… Newly publicized [...]

A spokesman for China's Foreign Ministry said Thursday that the case of a detained Chinese researcher who worked for the New York Times is being dealt with according to Chinese law. Zhao Yan has been held since September 2004, and has still not been released by Chinese authorities despite two formal requests filed by Yan's [...]

Leading Muslim clerics have urged that Afghanistan ignore international pressure and execute Abdul Rahman for converting from Islam to Christianity. "The people will kill him if he is freed," declared the chief cleric of a Kabul mosque, and Abdul Raoulf, chief of the Afghan Ulama Council added that "we will call on the people to [...]

Prosecutors concluded their case in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui Thursday with the testimony of former FBI agent Aaron Zebley, who claimed that the FBI would have been able to trace records and identify 11 of the 19 hijackers if Moussaoui had admitted receiving thousands of dollars in wire transfers when he was arrested [...]

A Belgrade court has reinstated an arrest warrant against the widow of ex-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic after she failed to attend a court appearance scheduled for Thursday. Mira Markovic was charged with abuse of power when she obtained a flat for the family nanny. The court withdrew the outstanding arrest warrant earlier this month at [...]

US House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) said Thursday that they have sent a letter to President Bush asking if he knew when he signed the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 that it suffered from a "fundamental constitutional problem." Due to a clerical error, identical versions of the legislation were not [...]