Syria agreed Friday to allow UN investigators to question five unidentified Syrian officials at the Vienna UN offices in connection with the February assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri . The agreement has pleased chief UN investigator Detlev Mehlis, who was on the verge of giving up on Syrian cooperation . Deputy Foreign [...]

The scope of the US Department of Justice probe into the dealings of former high-powered Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff may implicate more public officials than previously anticipated, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Prosecutors indicted Abramoff in August on charges of bank fraud, and he remains the center of an investigation into [...]

The office of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced Friday that it does not expect to pursue state criminal charges against Maurice "Hank" Greenberg , former AIG chairman and CEO. Spitzer originally filed suit against AIG, Greenberg and its former CFO in May, alleging that the defendants engaged in fraudulent transactions to prop up [...]

Projet de loi relatif à la lutte contre le terrorisme et portant dispositions diverses relatives à la sécurité et aux contrôles frontaliers . Read the full text of the draft law . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The ailing former senior Iraqi intelligence officer who in late October became the first witness to testify in the trial of ousted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein has died, the chief prosecutor of the case before the Iraqi High Criminal Court (formerly the Iraqi Special Tribunal ) said Friday. Waddah al-Sheikh had been suffering from cancer [...]

Russian President Valdimir Putin has said he will consider amendments to a bill overwhelmingly approved by the lower house of the Russian parliament Wednesday that would greatly increase state control over non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by requiring them to register with a state commission and imposing financial oversight on their operations. He told an NGO representative [...]

Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said Thursday that media reports that US CIA planes had made secret illegal stops in Spain while carrying terror suspects were unjustified as the US stopovers were legal, but promised to check aircraft more closely in the future. Spain has already been investigating allegations of the secret landings in [...]

Former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet was formally charged with human rights violations Thursday and placed under house arrest on the heels of an unrelated indictment on corruption charges filed Wednesday on which he was granted bail. This time Pinochet has been charged in connection with the kidnapping and disappearance of six dissidents in 1974 [...]

A Senegal appeals court ruled Friday that it was "not competent" to extradite former Chad president Hissene Habre to Belgium to face charges of crimes against humanity – including some alleged 40,000 executions and the torture of over 200,000 people – committed during his 1982-90 rule of the African country. Habre has been living is [...]

Next Wednesday Robin Lovitt , 41, is slated to become the 1,000th person to be executed since the 10 year moratorium on capital punishment in the United States was lifted in 1977. He is convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a pool hall robbery in Virginia in 1998. Convicted killer Gary Gilmore [...]