Elouise Pepion Cobell, et al., v. Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of the Interior, et al., US District Court for the District of Columbia, January 30, 2008 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Thousands of lawyers held rallies across Pakistan on Thursday, protesting the ouster of Pakistani Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry and other superior court judges last November when Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule and suspended the country's constitution. The protests followed a statement by Chaudhry Wednesday in which he called Musharraf an "extremist" and [...]

Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi said Thursday that he is opposed to a proposed law that would allow most members of Saddam Hussein's defunct Baath Party to be reinstated to public life. Al-Hashemi criticized the Accountability and Justice Law , passed by the Iraqi parliament earlier this month and later endorsed by Prime Minister Nouri [...]

The US Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the execution of Alabama death row inmate James Harvey Callahan "pending the timely filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari." Callahan had been scheduled to be executed at 6 PM CST on Thursday. The stay will terminate automatically if Callahan's petition for certiorari is [...]

US President George W. Bush Thursday signed a 15-day extension to the temporary Protect America Act , carrying it beyond its February 1 expiration date. The Protect Act, enacted as a stopgap while Congress worked on long-term legislation to "modernize" the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) , currently allows the US government to eavesdrop [...]

The Russian Supreme Court Thursday rejected an appeal to overturn a life sentence for former Yukos security chief Alexei Pichugin for his involvement in organizing a series of contract killings. Pichugin was convicted by the Moscow City Court in August 2007 for organizing three murders and four attempted murders. Pichugin originally received a 24-year sentence [...]

The International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) Thursday called for Malaysia to lift the Internal Security Act (ISA) , a preventive detention law that allows the Malaysian government to detain suspects for two years without trial and to renew the detention indefinitely. The FIDH said that the ISA is contrary to fundamental human rights and [...]

The Zimbabwe High Court Wednesday ruled against an appeal filed by the legal team defending Simon Mann seeking to prevent Mann's extradition for trial in Equatorial Guinea. Judge Rita Makarau held that the government had enough evidence that Mann was involved in a plot to overthrow Equatorial Guinea President Teodoro Obiang Ngeuma to allow the [...]

Tom Burke : "The main legal issue is: the imprisonment, trials, and sentencing of Colombian revolutionaries in U.S. courts is a violation of the Colombian people's sovereignty. Ricardo Palmera is a political prisoner of the U.S. government. The U.S. has no right to put Ricardo Palmera on trial or to imprison him. The Bush administration [...]

Seven Islamic militants involved in multiple bombing attacks on a town in northwestern Bangladesh were sentenced to life in prison by a Bangladeshi court Thursday. The attacks were part of a larger bombing plot allegedly organized by the Islamic group Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) that set off more than 400 bombs nearly simultaneously throughout the [...]