A British court has convicted Afghan warlord Faryadi Sarwar Zardad of torture and the taking of hostages in Afghanistan in what may be the first conviction of an individual by a UK court for crimes committed abroad, a doctrine generally known as universal jurisdiction . UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith , speaking about the trial, [...]

Egypt has extended the detention period for four leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood arrested in May after the group held nationwide protests for political reform. Hundreds of group members were arrested during protests in favor of multi-candidate presidential elections. The arrests have drawn criticism from human rights groups and the number of political detainees still [...]

Germany's Federal Constitutional Court blocked the extradition of a suspected al-Qaeda financier to Spain on Monday, ruling that the European Union arrest warrant against him violated his rights. Mamoun Darkazanli, charged with supporting and financing al-Qaeda activites, holds both Syrian and German citizenship. The court ruled that since German law prohibits the handover of its [...]

After US courts approved military trials for terrorism suspects, Australian Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said his government now wished for a speedy trial for David Hicks , an Australian who was captured in Afghanistan fighting for the Taliban and is now being held at Guantanamo. Ruddock had earlier called in March for the US to move [...]

Polish Jews in Israel are strenuously objecting to a proposal now in the Polish parliament to return private property to Jews because it may also offer some validity to the Nazi Nuremberg laws put in place leading up to and during World War II. The bill seeks to provide compensation to Polish Jews who had [...]

The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said Monday that the government of Afghanistan is considering creating a war crimes court to deal with allegations of human rights abuses dating back to the Soviet invasion in the 1970s. Earlier this month Human Rights Watch issued a report calling for investigation of several high-level government officials , [...]

A Serbian court Monday convicted eight former members of special police unit that took orders from then-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic of killing ex-Serb President Ivan Stambolic in August 2000. The eight men were also convicted of the attempted asssassination of opposition leader Vuk Draskovic ; Milosevic saw both Stambolic and Draskovic as threats to his [...]

In the wake of a lawsuit from groups including the ACLU and Greenpeace , the US Department of Justice has admitted that the FBI has thousands of pages of records on file from scrutinizing US civil rights, environmental and other advocacy groups. The groups want the documents released and contend the files were compiled by [...]

TIME magazine reporter Matthew Cooper said Sunday in an article he has written on his grand jury testimony that Dick Cheney's chief of staff Lewis Libby contributed information to the story revealing the identity of Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Cooper said he spoke to Libby regarding a trip to Africa that Plame authorized [...]

A Jordan Public Security Department spokesman said Sunday that five suspected al-Qaida prisoners started a hunger strike on Tuesday to protest sentences handed down by Jordan's State Security Court in 2000. The prisoners are being held in Jordan's Qafqa Prison for their convictions for terrorist-related activities. Two of the prisoners have received death sentences and [...]