An extradition treaty between Pakistan and Britain is in the "final stages", according to a spokesman for the Pakistani government. The official declined to elaborate on how many wanted persons may be traded between the two countries after the treaty is finalized. No such formal agreement between the two countries presently exists, but previous informal [...]

Japan's House of Concilors , the upper house of the Japanese parliament, voted 125-108 Monday to defeat a plan by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to privatize the nation's postal service , Thirty members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party either voted against or failed to vote on the plan. Koizumi, keeping to an earlier promise, [...]

Former UK Home Secretary David Blunkett lined up over the weekend behind British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his new proposals for changing Britain's anti-terrorism laws , saying that parliament, not the courts, should be primarily responsible for protecting the security of the country:If the judiciary say 'We think that parliament was wrong and therefore [...]

A Yemeni court on Monday sentenced six men to jail for planning to blow up the British and Italian embassies and the French cultural center in Sanaa. The six men, believed to be members of al Qaeda, received sentences of three months to four years in prison. Two other men were acquitted. Yemen has captured [...]

Noaman Gomaa, a law professor who is one of two top challengers to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt's upcoming September elections , promised Sunday to repeal Egypt's controversial emergency law and release political prisoners if elected. The law was passed in 1981 after the assassination of Anwar Sadat and has drawn complaints from rights [...]

Officials in Qatar on Monday launched a new human rights department which will function as a branch of the country's Interior Ministry . The department will work closely with the National Human Rights Committee, a state-financed human rights watchdog, as well as other embassies, the labor department, the ministry of civil services affairs and the [...]

After Iraq accused Kuwait last week of encroaching on Iraqi terroritory and even stealing Iraqi oil , an Iraqi official said Monday that inspections showed no border violations being committed. Khaled al-Atiyah, who headed the inspection as an envoy to Kuwait, instead detailed a few Iraqi encroachments of "no more than a few meters". Atiyah [...]

The so-called G-4 plan for expansion of the UN Security Council now appears likely to fail as talks with the African Union to back the plan have broken down. Japan, Brazil, Germany and India along with the African Union had originally agreed to submit a single plan, but the African Union's efforts to agree on [...]

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani welcomed a diverse group of leaders to his Baghdad residence on Sunday in an effort to sort out the remaining stumbling blocks in the Iraq constitution . Talabani also met with the US ambassador, who on Saturday had cautioned Iraq against creating a hard-line Islamic state based on Islamic law with [...]

In a speech to the American Bar Association annual meeting in Chicago this weekend, US Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens noted "serious flaws'' in the American capital punishment system, though he stopped short of saying it should be completely done away with. Stevens pointed to recent exonerations, jury-selection processes, and statements from victims' families [...]