Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers said Thursday that there may be applications of Sharia law in the British legal system during a speech at the East London Mosque and London Muslim Centre . Phillips' comments were in support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams , who controversially [...]
US Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad submitted a draft resolution in the UN Security Council Thursday calling for sanctions against Zimbabwe's newly reinstalled president Robert Mugabe and eleven of his government and security aides. The sanctions are said to include an arms embargo on Zimbabwe, and travel bans and asset freezes on Mugabe [...]
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has urged the Mongolian government to "exercise the utmost restraint" in dealing with protests of the country's recent parliamentary elections. President Nambar Enkhbayar on Tuesday instituted a four-day state of emergency following protests in which at least five have been killed and more than 700 [...]
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Thursday blasted a proposed plan that would allow Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents to consider a person's race, religion, or ethnicity in deciding whether to open a terrorism investigation. CAIR decried the plan as "unconstitutional and un-American," saying that it could allow security agents to target Muslims and [...]
Yemeni officials met with a visiting US delegation Thursday to discuss the possible transfer of Yemeni detainees still held at Guantanamo Bay . A major impediment to the negotiated release and repatriation of Yemeni detainees – who make up the largest single group of nationals at the prison – has been concern that they might [...]
The US District Court for the District of Columbia Wednesday chose Judge Thomas Hogan to preside over the habeas corpus appeals of Guantanamo Bay detainees seeking to challenge their detention in federal court under the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Boumediene v. Bush. Hogan will rule on procedural issues common to all cases. Also on [...]
Pakistani Supreme Court Bar Association President Aitzaz Ahsan strongly criticized the Bush administration's Pakistan policy during a visit to the US this past week, arguing that its refusal to condemn President Pervez Musharraf's November 2007 declaration of emergency law and his concomitant ouster of superior court judges is harming relations between the countries. On Tuesday, [...]
The Italian government Thursday began carrying out a controversial plan to fingerprint the country's Roma minority , despite fierce criticism from the international human rights community and Roma advocates . The fingerprinting scheme, announced last Thursday by Interior Minister Roberto Maroni , involves recording the fingerprints of thousands of Roma, including children, ostensibly to reduce [...]
Human Rights Watch Wednesday accused Sri Lanka of creating a de facto internment camp to arbitrarily detain more than 400 refugees fleeing areas of the country controlled by separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) . HRW rejected government claims that the detentions are meant for the refugees' own protection and called on the government [...]
A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York Tuesday ordered Google to turn over databases containing logs of every time any IP address has accessed any YouTube video. Viacom had requested access to the databases in a lawsuit brought for copyright infringement, arguing that Google and YouTube knowingly made [...]
