Yemeni Guantanamo Bay detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan said Monday that he will join fellow detainees in a boycott of his upcoming military commission trial. Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden who has been in US custody since 2001, said at a pre-trial hearing that he will not participate in the trial and will [...]

The UN Security Council should push the US to address human rights concerns over policies governing detainees held by US-led coalition forces in Iraq, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a Monday letter to Council representatives. HRW accused the Multi-National Force-Iraq of holding thousands of detainees without proper judicial review, and said that MNF-I is [...]

Spain's National Court on Monday ruled that former Argentinean President Isabel Peron would not be extradited to face charges in Argentina related to her alleged role in "Dirty War" disappearances before she left office in 1976. The court found that the charges against Peron did not amount to crimes against humanity and that therefore the [...]

Kenyan military forces tortured over 4,000 suspected rebels in a recent crackdown against the Sabaot Land Defence Force (SLDF), according to a report released Monday by human rights group Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU) . The group accused soldiers of crimes against humanity in a campaign against the SLDF, a guerrilla militia along the Uganda-Kenya border, [...]

Zimbabwean lawyers Monday appealed for the release of several hundred opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) members detained after police raids on Friday, saying that the the MDC members were being held in defiance of a court order. Witnesses say that police were searching for vote counting materials that might show that MDC candidate Morgan [...]

Ali Khan : "Pakistan's ruling Coalition has less than forty-eight hours left to fulfill their pre-election promise with the nation to restore the high court judges that General Musharraf fired by means of the 2007 Emergency Proclamation last November, an action contrary to the Constitution. The country's lawyers are likely to protest hard and refuse [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday let stand Indiana's controversial voter identification statute , which requires voters to present photo identification as a prerequisite to voting. The decision comes in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board , where the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld the law in 2007, ruling that it [...]

The US Justice Department told a member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee that abusive or humiliating interrogations of terror suspects ostensibly prohibited by the common article 3 of the Geneva Conventions on "outrages upon personal dignity" might be permissible if "undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation [...]

Farzana Hassan and Tarek Fatah : "How long will it take the leadership of North America's traditional Muslim leadership to embrace the First amendment of the United Sates constitution and the doctrine of the separation of religion and state? Will the concept of freedom of expression survive ever-new challenges from the defenders of medieval traditions [...]

Faisal Naseem Chaudhry : "On April 22, a delegation of Lahore-based lawyers called on deposed Pakistan Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry at his residence in the capital Islamabad. Since many could had wished to become part of the delegation, the leaders of the Bar Association kept the visit quite secret. Luckily, the brother-in-law of the [...]