California's Fourth District Court of Appeals heard arguments Tuesday to determine whether physicians can refuse to provide fertility treatments to a homosexual women based upon their religious beliefs. In a case expected to eventually be heard by the Supreme Court, Drs. Christine Brody and Douglas Fenton contend they refused to artificially inseminate Guadalupe Benitez because [...]

US officials outlined procedures for the upcoming trial of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in a special background briefing at the State Department Tuesday. The officials, speaking "on background" because the trial is an Iraqi process , said Hussein would appear before three judges of the Iraqi Special Tribunal beginning October 19 on charges relating [...]

Human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch Wednesday called on US federal and state lawmakers to change mandatory sentencing schemes under which thousands of juvenile prisoners face the prospect of life sentences without parole. A new joint report entitled The Rest of Their Lives says that some 2225 prisoners are incarcerated indefinitely in [...]

In his first media briefing, incoming UK lord chief justice Lord Phillips has warned the British government to back off pressuring the judiciary to enforce its own views of the law in terror-related or other cases. Speaking Tuesday at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, he observed, "Occasionally one feels that an individual politician [...]

A Russian military court in the North Caucasus region has found two Russian soldiers not guilty of murdering three civilians during operations in the war-torn region of Chechnya . Interior Force officers Yevgeny Khudyakov and Sergei Arakcheyev were charged with killing three Chechen construction workers in January 2003 . Investigators said the Khudyakov-Arakcheyev reconnaissance unit [...]

A US congressional panel said Tuesday that China had made no significant progress in human rights or law reform over the past year despite announced efforts in those areas. The 2005 Annual Report of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China noted ongoing abuses of political and religious rights and freedom of expression, such as harassing and [...]

Lawyers for Republican members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday that President Bush's nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court was uniformly unpopular among committee staffers, and that some questioning her qualifications and conservative pedigree were actively researching ways to rebut arguments put forward in her favor by the [...]

Former French UN ambassador Jean-Bernard Merimee is expected to appear before a French judge Wednesday after having been detained by authorities investigating allegations of fraud and corruption in the UN Oil-for-Food program . Merimee was France's representative to the UN from 1991-95 and worked as a special adviser to UN Kofi Annan from 1999-2002. He [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Clark Lombardi of the University of Washington School of Law says that given the ambiguous and open-ended nature of the draft Iraqi constitution, its approval in the October 15 referendum would only mark the start of much more hard work to establish a functional, peaceful and united Iraqi state … Later this [...]

New York Times reporter Judith Miller is set Wednesday to go back for a second round of testimony before a federal grand jury probing the 2003 leak of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame by White House sources after her husband, US ambassador Joseph Wilson, publicly questioned the Bush Administration's handling of pre-war Iraq [...]