Thai government officials have announced a program of legal assistance for victims of last week's tsunami that killed over 4000 people in Thailand and left thousands more in the country homeless. A senior spokesman for the Thai Ministry of Justice was quoted Monday as saying that the Ministry will set up a special legal center [...]

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Monday that an autonomy plan passed by Basque lawmakers last week is doomed for failure and called the proposal secessionist, unconstitutional and an anomaly in a Europe moving to become more united. Last Thursday, the Basque regional legislature approved a plan seeking to amend the 1970 charter [...]

Survivors and families of victims of last week's tsunami disaster in South Asia are falling prey to thieves, rapists, kidnappers and hoaxers. Sri Lanka's Women and Media Collective said Monday that they "have received reports of incidents of rape, gang rape, molestation and physical abuse of women and girls in the course of unsupervised rescue [...]

Scotland's Tory leader David McLetchie is calling for public debate over Scotland's proposed ban on smoking in public places, saying the ban is tougher than that proposed in a UK white paper, published in November (JURIST's Paper Chase has background on the UK proposal). The Scottish plan, approved by the Scottish Executive last November, would [...]

Reacting to reports of a US government plan to detain some suspected terrorists for life (see this previous report on JURIST's Paper Chase), Sen. Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin have suggested that the proposal was unconstitutional. Appearing on Fox News Sunday, Lugar called lifetime detentions without judicial [...]

Michael Froomkin, University of Miami School of Law: "The US holds maybe hundreds of non-citizens, all captured abroad (we are told), incarcerated in Guantanamo and in other secret prisons around the world. The Bush administration plans to hold them up to forever. Of course, there is a difference between the Soviet Gulag, which was aimed [...]

Party activists and state ministers in Indonesia have expressed concern about possible human trafficking in parentless or apparently-parentless children after last week's tsunami which killed more than 80,000 Indonesians and left over 5 million people in South Asia homeless, perhaps up to one-third of those children. Members of the Islamic Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) [...]

The White House is planning a system for indefinitely imprisoning terror suspects it is unwilling to set free or turn over to foreign or domestic courts, according a report in Sunday's Washington Post . The Pentagon and CIA have requested that the administration come up with a more permanent approach for dealing with current military [...]

2004 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, January 1, 2005. Read the full text of the report here . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

In a year-end report on the federal judiciary issued Saturday Chief Justice William Rehnquist, still recovering at home from cancer treatment that has kept him off the bench since November, emphasized the need to protect judges from political pressure and threats, citing calls from some conservative groups in partiuclar to impeach judges for judicial "activism":By [...]