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 [...]

In a bid to expedite the already-urgent task of finding and burying the more than 4000 local victims of last Sunday's South Asian tsunami, officials in the Thai Department of Corrections have offered reduced prison terms to volunteering inmates convicted of petty crimes serving sentences of less than two years. Thai pisoners have been asked [...]

New laws slated to take effect January 1 with the start of the New Year came into force in many jurisdictions across the United States Saturday, affecting areas from health insurance to gay rights. In Maine, the state-supported universal health care program began coverage for small businesses and the self-employed. In New York state, wild [...]

Ricardo Palmera, aka "Simon Trinidad", the most senior leader of the controversial Colombian rebel group FARC was extradited to the United States Friday to face drug smuggling and kidnapping charges. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe agreed to Palmera's release to US authorities after the rebel group failed to release any of the more than 60 hostages [...]

In what appears to be the first move of its kind by a western country, the government of Canada has announced that it will expedite immigration requests for victims of last Sunday's South Asian tsunami who have relatives in Canada. The move is expected to bring in some 5000 new immigrants, mostly from Sri Lanka. [...]