Senior US military and Justice Department officials defended Guantanamo prison and US policy towards terror detainees Wednesday at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Citing continued uncertainty about their status, Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) urged Congress to define the legal rights of the detainees, complaining that legislation he introduced in 2002 on the matter went [...]

Terri Schiavo autopsy report, Florida District Six Medical Examiner, June 15, 2005 . Read the full text of the report here. Reported in JURIST Paper Chasehere.

Hearing on Detainees, US Senate Judiciary Committee, June 15, 2005 . Excerpt from the testimony of Professor Stephen Schulhofer, New York University School of Law: For half a century, the United States has exported democracy and human rights to the whole world, but Guantánamo has tarnished America's name and poisoned our reputation. We don't yet [...]

An autopsy report released Wednesday showed that Terri Schiavo had a severely "atrophied" brain that weighed less than half of what a normal brain should weigh and was irreversibly damaged. Pinellas-Pasco Medical Examiner Jon Thogmartin said that the findings were "consistent" with a person in a persistent vegetative state. The autopsy also found no evidence [...]

The Iraqi Special Tribunal (IST) Wednesday questioned Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan , a half-brother of Saddam Hussein, in connection with crimes committed against the Kurds in the early 1980s. The tribunal questioned Hussein himself earlier in the week . Although under pressure to move forward in the case, no date has been set for a trial [...]

New York-based monitoring group Human Rights Watch reported Wednesday that thousands of people have been arrested and some 36 killed across Ethiopia in skirmishes with police during election-related protests. HRW said that the deaths occured when "security forces responded to incidents of rock-throwing and looting by opening fire indiscriminately on large crowds of people". The [...]

The Sarajevo cantonal court in Bosnia-Herzegovina sentenced Serb Goran Vasic to six years in prison on Wednesday for his role in the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners at a detention camp near Sarajevo in 1992. Vasic was acquitted of an assassination charge due to lack of evidence. He had been tried and convicted three [...]

A Senate committee approved the nomination of Lester Crawford as the new head of the US Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday, sending the issue to the full Senate for a final vote. A number of Democrats on the committee had criticized Crawford, currently acting FDA Commissioner, for not having made a determination on allowing [...]

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday that a dozen former Guantanamo detainees have gone back to fighting against the US since their release, as evidenced by their recapture or confirmed death. Gonzales' statement echos similar reports from Pentagon and highly-placed Congressional sources last year , when reference was made to 5 released Afghans who [...]

Canadian Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier announced Wednesday that Inuit hunters in the North plan to file a petition accusing the US government of human rights violations by continually fuelling global warming. Troubled by the melting of Arctic ice caps, the Inuit hope the petition will put pressure on the US to reduce industrial emissions of [...]