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 [...]

Report of the Special Rapporteur of the Commission on Human Rights on the independence of judges and lawyers, August 31, 2005, released October 10, 2005 . Excerpt: At the time of writing (August 2005), the Special Rapporteur is concerned about the judicial proceedings taking place before the Iraqi Special Tribunal. Despite the commitment and personal [...]

Lawyers representing Rep. Tom DeLay Tuesday subpoenaed Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle in order to show that the Texas prosecutor acted improperly with grand jurors in seeking indictments against DeLay on conspiracy and money-laundering charges. DeLay's attorney has submitted a list of 12 questions for Earle to answer, including why a decision by a [...]

In what some Iraqi officials are calling a "breakthrough," Shiite and Kurdish leaders of the Iraqi government have agreed to allow the country's parliament to review possible future amendments to the Iraqi constitution , a demand considered key to winning the support of Iraq's minority Sunni population in the upcoming October 15 referendum . Under [...]