Thailand Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva on Saturday instituted a state of emergency in Bangkok and several provinces and cancelled an ongoing summit of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders in the country following an outbreak of protests calling for his resignation. The protests were lead by the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship [...]

Philip D. Cave : "The Military Commissions have been insufficiently transparent over the years, and this has lead to a great deal of skepticism and mistrust from the public. As I and colleagues have counseled elsewhere, we should be careful of litigation by media. (Disclosure, I know and have worked with all three – Colonel [...]

Andrew Hudson : "The conviction of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori for serious human rights violations is groundbreaking on a number of levels. First, not only was a former head of state found guilty of crimes against humanity, but his conviction came at the hands of a court is his own nation. The Peruvian Court [...]

Mohammad Asif Mohseni, a key Shi'ite cleric in Afghanistan, defended a controversial law Saturday that critics say limits women's rights in the country. The measure, called the Shi'ite Personal Status Law , was signed into law last month by President Hamid Karzai , but the law has yet to be published. Opponents of the law [...]

A federal judge ruled Friday that investors who lost money in Bernard Madoff's alleged Ponzi scheme can force Madoff into personal bankruptcy to recover lost funds. The ruling from Judge Louis Stanton of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York removes a restriction on Madoff's bankruptcy that was established by Stanton [...]

Commodore Josaia Voreqe "Frank" Bainimarama , the head of the Fijian military, was reappointed Saturday as prime minister of the country by President Ratu Josefa Iloilo a day after Iloilo suspended the country's constitution following a Thursday ruling by the Fiji Court of Appeals that declared Bainimarama's original appointment as prime minister unconstitutional. Bainimarama led [...]

The administration of US President Barack Obama will appeal a ruling made last week by Judge John Bates of the US District Court for the District of Columbia that allowed detainees being held by the US in Afghanistan to proceed with habeas corpus challenges to their detention. Word of the appeal came Friday in a [...]

Frank Smyth : "There is nothing that repressive regimes like more than pointing the finger at someone else. Nearly four years ago, after journalists including Judith Miller then of The New York Times were jailed for refusing to reveal sources in response to federal subpoenas, senior government officials in other nations from Venezuela to Cameroon [...]

The US Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) denied Friday the emergency stay of deportation filed by accused Nazi prison camp guard John Demjanjuk . In March, a Munich district court charged Demjanjuk with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder for his alleged involvement at the Sobibor concentration camp. Demjanjuk had filed the emergency stay of [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Friday refused a petition for an en banc rehearing by former Ukranian prime minister Pavlo Lazarenko , who had been on trial for money laundering and embezzling, allowing several of his convictions to stand. In September, the appeals court vacated Lazarenko's nine-year sentence , setting [...]