A draft of Attorney General nominee Alberto Gonzales' prepared statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee intended for delivery at his confirmation hearing Thursday and obtained late Wednesday notably makes no mention of torture, prisoners, detainees, Guantanamo, Iraq or the Geneva Conventions, taking a speak-no-evil approach to a wide range of issues on which Gonzales is [...]

A US military spokesman said Wednesday that US Southern Command has opened an investigation into allegations of Iraqi prisoner abuse made by FBI personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and made public last month (see this report in JURIST's Paper Chase) after a Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU. Read a Southern Command press [...]

TV Azteca, Mexico's second largest broadcaster, said Wednesday that civil fraud charges announced against it and its top executives yesterday by the US Securities and Exchange Commission were false and alleged that the SEC was pursuing it to distract attention from its own failing in policing corporate fraud in the US. The SEC says the [...]

Report on Global Anti-Semitism, July 1, 2003 — December 15, 2004, submitted by the Department of State to the Committee on Foreign Relations and the Committee on International Relations in accordance with Section 4 of PL 108-332, December 30, 2004, released January 5, 2005. Read the full text of the report here. Reported in JURIST's [...]

The driver of two French journalists who were captured in Iraq by Islamic militants and held for five months until their release in late December is suing the US military for mistreatment and torture, according to the office of maverick French advocate Jacques Verges. Muhamed al-Jundi, a Syrian, was captured along with the journalists but [...]

British Prime Minister Tony Blair Wednesday defended a controversial law allowing the detention of foreign terror suspects without charge or trial even in the face of a House of Lords ruling that the law is contrary to European human rights laws. The Lords ruled against the detention provisions 8-1 in a highly-publicized decision on December [...]

White House counsel Alberto Gonzales personally sought a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security in 2002, current and former administration officials said Tuesday, a revelation that could have serious repercussions in Gonzales confirmation hearings for the post of Attorney General slated [...]

Sexual and physical abuse of Iraqi prisoners continued at least three months after news of Abu Ghraib was revealed according to accounts by alleged victims in the most recent issue of Vanity Fair magazine. The report, based on 60 hours of interviews with former detainees, quotes accounts of mistreatment that took place in July, three [...]

AP is reporting from Kyiv that losing presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, who resigned as Ukrainian Prime Minister last week, has appealed the results from last month's election re-vote to Ukraine's Supreme Court. The high court has already rejected several compliants from the Yanukovych campaign originally filed with the Central Electoral Commission concerning the conduct of [...]

A new State Department annual report issued Wednesday under the Global Anti-Semitism Review Act signed by President Bush in October 2004 says that global anti-Semitism is on the rise, particularly because of the number of poor, uneducated Muslims in Western Europe. The report notes that acts of anti-Semitism have increased in Eastern Europe in both [...]