China will increase the number of public trials for death penalty appeals during the second half of 2006, a legal scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said Monday. Liu Renwen estimated that China executes approximately 8,000 people per year, giving the country the highest number of executions in the world. The Supreme Court [...]

Police in the Philippines Monday charged 16 people with rebellion for allegedly planning to oust Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo , according to the head of the police legal department. The coup plot involved five members of the Philippines House of Representatives , soldiers, a communist rebel leader, and Philippines Senator Gregorio Honasan , who participated [...]

Leading Monday's international brief, despite the status of Hamas as a listed terrorist entity, the European Union has announced plans at a foreign ministers' meeting Monday to attempt to work around a legal ban that prohibits European nations from providing funding to any member of Hamas. Since Hamas' victory in Palestinian elections in January, the [...]

Khalil Dulaimi , chief defense lawyer for ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein , told Reuters Sunday he met with his client for seven hours and discussed a possible end to the defense boycott of the trial. Earlier this month, Hussein's lawyers claimed they were being denied access to their client and had been refused visits [...]

California Youth and Adult Corrections Secretary Roderick Hickman said over the weekend that he is resigning his post after a two year attempt to reform California's prison system. Appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger , Hickman was tasked with improving a correctional system that faces immense problems such as overcrowding, an aging inmate population and an [...]

Inmates at the main US base in Afghanistan are being held in "primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges" according to a Sunday New York Times report . Over 500 terror suspects are held at Bagram Air Base , located north of Kabul. The Times says that inmates live by the dozen in large wire cages [...]

Russian diplomats Saturday criticized the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for its Friday refusal to grant former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic provisional release so that he might travel to Russia for medical treatment for a heart condition. Prosecutors feared that Milosevic might claim he was too sick to return from Moscow to continue [...]

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said Saturday he will lobby the United Nations and the Organization of the Islamic Conference to make blasphemy an internationally-recognized criminal offense in the wake of controversy surrounding the worldwide republication of caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad that first appeared in the Danish Jyllands-Posten newspaper in September. A spokesman told reporters [...]

US Federal District Court Judge Jose Linares, presiding over a lawsuit by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to block United Arab Emirates -owned Dubai Ports World from taking over the management of six major US seaport facilities including New Jersey's Port Newark, issued an order Friday asking federal officials to explain [...]

An Afghan court Saturday found Asadullah Sarwari , head of the country's intelligence department in the communist era, guilty of ordering hundreds of murders and sentenced him to death. Sarwari, who defended himself in the one-day trial, is expected to appeal the ruling that arose from his conduct under Afghanistan’s Soviet supported communist regime in [...]