A bail hearing for Lucia Pinochet Hiriart, daughter of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is set for Monday in Santiago Monday following Hiriat's return to Chile Saturday after she withdrew her request for asylum in the United States. She fled Chile last week after being indicted on tax evasion charges . Hiriat was told that [...]

AP is reporting that the chief lawyer for Saddam Hussein has said that Hussein and his defense team will boycott trial proceedings when they resume Wednesday. The trial resumed briefly Sunday under new Kurdish chief judge Ra'uf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman but was adjourned again after Hussein, defense lawyers, and two co-defendants left the courtroom in protest [...]

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 [...]