Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom vetoed a bill Friday that would have restored the country's death penalty . Decree 06-2008 would also have given Colom, sworn into office just last month the power to decide whether to grant clemency and commute the sentences of the 34 inmates currently on death row to 50 years in prison, [...]
JURIST Special Guest Columnist and British human and medical rights activist Dr. David Nicholl, a neurologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, UK, says that Amnesty International's new report into the rendition and torture of one-time "ghost detainee" Khaled al-Maqtari by the CIA highlights yet again the complicity of doctors in the US detention and rendition [...]
United States of America v. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, United States Military Commission, March 14, 2008 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
US military judge Col. Peter Brownback on Friday ruled that interrogation materials, including names of interrogators, relevant to the case of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr must be turned over to Khadr's defense team. Earlier in the week it was unintentionally revealed that one of Khadr's interrogators was Sgt. Joshua Claus, a US interrogator who later [...]
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Friday remanded to district court a bid by Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Belbacha to obtain a preliminary injunction barring his transfer back to his home country of Algeria. The court in January had initially stayed his transfer against the urging of the Bush administration. [...]
A former CIA "ghost detainee" detailed torture and abuse by agency interrogators at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and a secret CIA facility in Afghanistan in an Amnesty International (AI) report released Friday. Khaled Abdu Ahmed Saleh al-Maqtari, a Yemeni national, was held for a total of 32 months after being arrested in Fallujah in January [...]
A controversial bill to amend the Foreign Intelligence Security Act narrowly passed the US House of Representatives Friday in the face of a White House threat to veto it. By 213-197 House Democrats pushed through new surveillance regulations that would extend government power to eavesdrop on individuals within the United States under judicial oversight but [...]
A new executive order weakens much of the authority of the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB) , the independent committee of private citizens which since 1976 has been responsible for reporting illegal US intelligence activities to both the president and the attorney general. The order, signed February 29, removes the IOB's oversight authority over each US [...]
UK Home Office minister Tony McNulty told members of Parliament in a written statement to the House of Commons Thursday that control orders limiting movement and restricting the rights of uncharged individuals are currently in force against 11 people suspected of terrorist activity, down from a previous 15. The names of the suspects were withheld [...]
Myanmar opposition group 88 Generation Students urged Burmese voters Friday to reject the country's new draft constitution in an upcoming national referendum . The group said in a public statement that the new constitution would only further legitimize military rule and that the procedures set in place to govern the referendum are a "sham". The [...]
