The Council of Europe said Wednesday that an investigation into allegations that the US Central Intelligence Agency operated secret prisons in Europe revealed no "smoking gun" evidence that proved the existence of the prisons. COE Secretary General Terry Davis , presenting his findings on alleged illegal detentions and rendition flights on European territory based on [...]

US District Judge Federico Moreno ruled Tuesday that the US Coast Guard acted unreasonably when it sent 15 Cubans back home after their boat reached an abandoned bridge in January and said that the Cubans had reached US soil. The Coast Guard acted under the government's "wet-foot, dry foot" policy , which allows Cubans to [...]

Saddam Hussein admitted in court Wednesday that he had ordered the trial of a group of Shiites who were executed under his regime in the 1980s and that he had ordered that their land be confiscated, but he also asserted that his actions were not criminal. Speaking at the close of proceedings at his trial [...]

Leading Wednesday's international brief, a British official has revealed that the UN Security Council will be presented with a resolution in the next two weeks that will seek to impose mandatory sanctions against up to ten government officials in Sudan for their involvement in the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur . Security Council members have [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Nancy Rapoport, dean of the University of Houston Law Center, says that as we watch witnesses at the trial of former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling continue to testify about Enron's earnings management, we should ask ourselves if we're really all that different from the defendants when we "manage" numbers [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Daniel Joyner of the University of Warwick School of Law in the United Kingdom says that now that Iran has been referred to the UN Security Council over its nuclear program, some Council action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter seems likely, but it's difficult to see what would come of [...]

The Montenegrin government agreed Tuesday to delay the republic's independence referendum from Serbia originally scheduled for April 30 and accept a controversial formula proposed by the European Union (EU) . The EU said earlier in the week that it would consider the referendum to be valid only if there is a 55% majority, a turnout [...]

Two British court-appointed lawyers assisting former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic have submitted a motion to subpoena former US president Bill Clinton to testify at Milosevic's trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) . Milosevic is asking for Clinton's testimony asserting he was privy to vital information about the Balkan wars and [...]

The Russian Education Ministry faces a lawsuit calling for it to remove evolution from the national science curriculum. The parents of Maria Shreiber, a 15 year old schoolgirl from St. Petersburg, have argued in court papers that school presentation of Darwin's theory prevents students from developing different beliefs about the creation of man. The case [...]

American Online Inc. v John Does, United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, February 27, 2006 . Read the full text of the complaints. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.