Leading Monday's international brief, the Sudanese government has criticized a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights report released last Friday which sharply condemned the human rights condition in Darfur . Jamal Mohamed Ibrahim, the spokesperson for the Sudanese Foreign Ministry, called the report excessive and warned that it would contribute to inflexibility on the part [...]

The trial of Uzbek opposition leader and businessman Sanjar Umarov opened and promptly adjourned Monday in Tashkent after defense lawyers requested more time to prepare their case. Umarov, a leader of the opposition Sunshine Uzbekistan Coalition , was arrested in October on charges that include embezzlement, tax fraud, and bribery. The Bush administration and international [...]

British politicians, writers and comedians are urging members of the UK House of Commons to accept freedom of speech revisions in the controversial Racial and Religious Hatred Bill , which returns to the Commons for a vote Tuesday. The bill was amended in the British House of Lords last year when peers voted to restrict [...]

The Egyptian government has said that it will not deport hundreds of Sudanese detainees who lack status as refugees or asylum seekers. The detainees were arrested after a three-month sit-in protest in front of UN offices in Cairo resulted in a violent clash with Egyptian police on December 30, resulting in 27 deaths . The [...]

Cambodian President Hun Sen has said that a court has refused to allow him to drop criminal defamation charges against a group of human rights activists, as he had promised last week. In a speech on Monday, Hun Sen said that the court ruled out dropping the charges because investigative proceedings had already begun. The [...]

Jury selection is set to begin Monday in the criminal trial of former Enron founder Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling on conspiracy and fraud charges . Defense lawyers for Lay and Skilling had asked that the trial be moved out of Houston, arguing that they will not get a fair trial due to [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Brian J. Foley of Florida Coastal School of Law says that the greatest threat posed by President Bush's domestic surveillance program is not to the privacy of ordinary Americans but rather to the independence of potential political rivals, journalists, and activists who would balance, constrain or oppose executive power… Most of the [...]

Finnish leaders hinted over the weekend that they would like to put the European Constitution back on the table for discussion at the October summit of European Union leaders scheduled during Finland's six-month presidency of the regional group. Although the document seemed to be dead after the French and the Dutch voted against it last [...]

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) , a Republican member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee , Sunday questioned the legitimacy of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program , casting doubt on its legality in the absence of judicial or Congressional authority. Notwithstanding legal defenses of the intercepts by President Bush , Vice President Cheney , and [...]

The UK plan for national identification cards received another setback Sunday when Lord Carlile , the Liberal Democrat peer appointed by the British government as an independent reviewer of its anti-terror laws, said that the ID cards would be of "limited value" against terrorism and would not have prevented the London bombings in July. Carlile, [...]