Hicks to serve terror sentence in Australia if convicted News
Hicks to serve terror sentence in Australia if convicted

[JURIST] Australian-born terror suspect David Hicks [JURIST news archive] will serve his prison sentence in Australia if convicted by a US military commission [JURIST news archive] at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive], Australian Justice Minister Chris Ellison [official profile] said Thursday. Hicks, captured in Afghanistan by US forces in 2001 with suspected ties to the Taliban, is one of ten charged Guantanamo Bay detainees awaiting trial by a military commission in Guantanamo. The ten trials have been postponed pending a US Supreme Court [official website] decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld [Duke Law case backgrounder; JURIST news archive] challenging the legality of the military commissions.

The Australian and US governments brokered a deal [JURIST report] in May to transfer prisoners sentenced by the military commissions pending approval by both governments. Hicks successfully petitioned for British citizenship [JURIST report] because his mother is a British citizen in an effort to have the UK government lobby for his release, as it had done with all other British detainees at Guantanamo. The UK Foreign Office [official website] announced earlier this week, however, that it will not lobby for Hicks' release [JURIST report] because he was traveling under an Australian passport when he was detained in 2001. Reuters has more.

THIS DAY @ LAW

UN General Assembly approves Palestine partition plan

The UN General Assembly approved UN Resolution Resolution 181 (II) on November 29, 1947, recommending that the British Mandate for Palestine be split into a Jewish state, an Arab state, and an international zone for Jerusalem. The vote in the assembly was 33 for to 13 against, with 10 abstentions. The resolution sparked a war between Palestinian Arabs and Jews in 1947 and a wider war after Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon invaded the new State of Israel in 1948. Read Resolution 181 (II).

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