The UK's former senior law lord Thomas Bingham on Monday criticized official UK legal justifications given for the 2003 US and UK invasion of Iraq, saying it was "a serious violation of international law and of the rule of law." Bingham focused on legal advice that then-Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith gave to the British [...]
Officials from the administration of US president-elect Barack Obama will likely not prosecute Americans who approved or actually carried out the torture or other harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects, according to an AP report published Monday. The adoption of such a policy would be in line with plans expressed earlier in the presidential campaigns. During [...]
US Marine Col. Ralph Kohlmann announced Monday that his retirement from the post of chief judge of US military commissions will be effective immediately. Kohlmann initially announced his retirement in September, but said then that it would not be effective until April 2009. According to an AFP report , Kohlmann decided to step down from [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Haider Ala Hamoudi of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law says that the American concession in the supposedly final version of the Status of Forces Agreement governing US troops in Iraq that would put US soldiers under Iraqi criminal process in limited instances has been made necessary by Iraqi skepticism over [...]
An Irish Times poll published Monday suggests that 52.5 percent of Irish voters would approve the Treaty of Lisbon if it were modified so that Ireland kept a European Union (EU) Commissioner and clarified Irish concerns over neutrality, abortion, and taxation. The poll has a margin of error of 3 percent, and broadly reaffirms the [...]
US president-elect Barack Obama has reportedly selected Gregory Craig to serve as White House counsel. Craig, who was an adviser to Obama during the presidential campaign, led former President Bill Clinton's defense during his 1998 impeachment proceedings . In 2000, Craig represented the father of Elian Gonzalez in his successful effort to gain custody of [...]
Victor Comras : "The process used to designate, and freeze the assets of, terrorists and those providing material support for terrorism, has come under serious judicial challenge here and abroad. The European Court of Justice recently invalidated the EU's designations (binding on all EU member countries) of Yasin Al Kadi and the European branches of [...]
German prosecutors announced Monday that they will extradite an aide to Rwandan President Paul Kagame to France on Wednesday in connection with the 1994 assassination of then-Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarima that led to the Rwanda genocide . Rose Kabuye , an official in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) , was arrested last week under a [...]
Officials from the Nepal Constituent Assembly (CA) on Monday announced that the CA will finish drafting the country's new constitution within 18 months. According to a unanimously approved timetable, the CA will approve the final version of the constitution by the end of April 2010, and it will be made public by mid-May of that [...]
Joanne Mariner : "In their sobering report, Guantanamo and Its Aftermath , researchers at the University of California, Berkeley – working in partnership with the Center for Constitutional Rights – have documented an array of serious abuses. The report describes how detainees held in U.S. military detention at Kandahar and Bagram, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo [...]
