In a rare political move, 84-year old Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi has refused to sign a justice bill sponsored by the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, sending it back to Italy's parliament for revision. The President's office issued a brief news release on the refusal Thursday (in Italian). Italian judges and prosecutors had [...]

A and others v. Secretary of State for the Home Department, United Kingdom House of Lords, December 16, 2004 . Excerpt (from the judgement by Lord Nichols): Indefinite imprisonment without charge or trial is anathema in any country which observes the rule of law. It deprives the detained person of the protection a criminal trial [...]

In the wake of the debacle over last month's presidential run-off in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Prosecutor-General's office has begun a criminal investigation into the activity of several members of the country's Central Election Commission, accused of deliberately miscalculating the ballots and deliberately announcing incorrect results. The Ukrainian parliament formally called for the probe Wednesday. MosNews [...]

Michael Froomkin, University of Miami School of Law: "You know you are in trouble when the House of Lords is more protective of civil rights than the US court system: Law lords back terror detainees: Detaining foreigners without trial under emergency anti-terror legislation breaks European human rights powers, law lords ruled today. The decision from [...]

A French court Thursday sentenced 10 Islamic militants for up to ten years each in prison for their roles in a failed plot to detonate a bomb in a Strasbourg market on New Year's Eve 2000. All the men (including one said to be an associate of Osam bin Laden) were Algerian or Franco-Algerian; four [...]

Speaking at a White House economic forum Wednesday, President Bush called on the new Congress to pass what he called "meaningful liability reform" on asbestos, on class action, and medical liability by curbing lawsuits in these areas which said had inhibited economic and job growth:…the cost of frivolous lawsuits, in some cases, make it prohibitively [...]

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, now held by the US for over a year at a facility outside Baghdad and due to be tried for war crimes, had his first meeting with members of his Jordanian-based legal defense team Thursday. A meeting last week had been scheduled and then quickly canceled for unknown reasons; on [...]

The chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed Wednesday that giant mortgage lender Fannie Mae, which finances the purchase of one out of every five homes in the US, violated accounting rules in respect of its handling of derivatives and some loan-related transactions between 2001 and 2004. Read the SEC release here. Fannie [...]

A Pentagon spokeperson said Wednesday that 130 US troops from various branches of the service have been charged or punished by the military in connection with the abuse of prisoners at facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. More than 100 are from the Army, responsible for detentions in the two combat theaters – of [...]

In the landmark ruling Thursday, an extraordinary nine-judge panel of the UK House of Lords, Britain's highest court, held that the indefinite detention of foreign terror suspects without charge by the British government was contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights, incorporated into domestic law by the UK Human Rights Act. Reversing a Court [...]