A new foreign intelligence surveillance bill is needed to ensure that the US intelligence community has "the agility and the speed that we had before" to capture terrorist communications in the war on terror, US Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said Sunday in an interview with Fox News Sunday. The temporary Protect America Act [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Jordan Paust of the University of Houston Law Center says that opinions of the US Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel that are manifestly inconsistent with or violative of the laws of war provide no legal cover for any member of the executive branch seeking impunity for alleged war crimes and [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Timothy Waters of Indiana University School of Law Bloomington says that Kosovo's declaration of independence represents a problematic precedent in international law that may ironically bring us back to self-determination as the core historical and moral justification for secession from Serbia… Even though Kosovo's leaders have now declared independence, the present period [...]
Kosovo Declaration of Independence, Kosovo Assembly, February 17, 2008 . Read the full text of the declaration. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
Human Rights Watch on Sunday called on Kenya's political leaders to enact reforms that would hold both recent and past human rights violators accountable for their actions in order to ensure lasting stability in the country. HRW's statement praised efforts by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to broker a deal between ruling and opposition parties [...]
The Assembly of Kosovo on Sunday declared the disputed territory independent from Serbia, formally marking the erstwhile Serbian province's bid to become "an independent, democratic and sovereign state." Kosovo's Prime Minister Hashim Thaci , President Fatmir Sejdiu and members of parliament overwhelmingly approved the Declaration of Independence which called for the creation of a "democratic, [...]
South Korean President-elect Lee Myung-bak was questioned Sunday by a special prosecutor's team regarding his alleged involvement in a 2001 stock manipulation scheme involving a former business partner and the investment firm BBK . Lee, former mayor of Seoul, had previously been cleared of the allegations, but the Constituional Court of Korea in January allowed [...]
Paul Rester, chief military interrogator at Guantanamo Bay and director of the Joint Intelligence Group, said in an interview with AP published Saturday that most of the intelligence obtained from detainees at the prison has come through non-coercive questioning and "rapport building," not harsh interrogation methods like waterboarding which have featured heavily in media reports. [...]
Spanish officials said Saturday the remaining members of Basque separatist group ETA allegedly involved in the December 2006 Madrid airport bombing were arrested Friday in France. The suspects, Mikel San Sebastian and Joseba Iturbide, were reportedly members of the Elurra commando, one of the most active factions of the armed Basque separatist movement. The Spanish [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Michael Kelly of Creighton University School of Law says that for historical and humanitarian reasons Kosovo's bid for self-determination will prevail over Russian legal objections despite the fact that the province's unilateral secession from Serbia has been sanctioned neither by Serbia nor the UN Security Council… With Kosovo's long-awaited declaration of independence [...]
