The UK House of Lords voted Wednesday in favor of abolishing the criminal offenses of blasphemy and blasphemous libel from the UK common law. By a vote of 148-87 , the House of Lords adopted Amendment 144B to the government-sponsored Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill . The full Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill has not [...]
A UK plan that would have required all citizens to obtain ID cards when applying for passports by 2010 has been dropped , the Home Office said Thursday. Under current plans, passports and driver's licenses will be considered acceptable alternative forms of identification for most UK citizens, although people in "positions of trust," such as [...]
Humanitarian conditions in the Gaza Strip have reached their lowest point since the beginning of the Israeli occupation in 1967, according to a report released Thursday by a coalition of eight UK-based human rights groups. The coalition, led by Amnesty International UK , said that 80 percent of Gaza's residents depend on food aid, an [...]
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on Wednesday denounced a Colombian attack on a Ecuadorian camp belonging to the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebel group as a "war crime." Chavez joined Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa in condemning Colombia for the attack, and both urged the Organization of American States (OAS) to conclude that the [...]
A federal judge in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Wednesday scheduled a June trial to resolve the decade-old Indian Trust case . In January, US District Judge James Robertson ruled that the US Department of the Interior (DOI) "unreasonably delayed" the accounting of billions of dollars of American Indian money [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Erlinder of William Mitchell College of Law, lead defense counsel in the Military-1 Trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and president of the Association des Avocats de la Defence (ADAD), the ICTR defense lawyers association, says that a recent UN-sanctioned agreement to turn prisoners convicted of war crimes [...]
Charge Sheet: Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud Al Qosi, US Department of Defense, March 5, 2008 . Read the full text of the Al Qosi charges as formally referred. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
The US Department of Defense said Wednesday that two charges have been referred against Guantanamo Bay detainee Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi . The military commission charges referred are "providing material support to terrorism and conspiring with Usama bin Laden and other al Qaeda members to target, attack and murder civilians; attack civilian objects; commit [...]
A federal jury in the US District Court for the District of Connecticut on Wednesday convicted a former sailor of providing material support to terrorists and disclosing confidential national defense information. Hassan Abu-Jihaad, formerly known as Paul R. Hall, was a signalman on the USS Benfold in 2001, when prosecutors alleged that he passed sensitive [...]
The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki will refuse to execute Ali Hassan al-Mahid , better known in the Western media as "Chemical Ali," over the Iraqi Presidency Council's decision not to approve the death sentences of al-Mahid's two co-defendants, an Iraqi government spokesperson told AP Wednesday. The Presidency Council approved al-Mahid's execution last [...]
