Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf Saturday lifted emergency rule over the country as anticipated , issuing an order reviving the suspended constitution, entrenching members of the country's post-emergency judiciary, and insulating actions taken under the emergency from any future legal challenges. The Revocation of Proclamation of Emergency Order 2007 also provides that the parliamentary elections scheduled [...]
US Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Friday that the Department of Justice will not provide information to congressional officials regarding its ongoing probe into the CIA's destruction of videotapes showing the interrogation of terror suspects. In a letter to top members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mukasey wrote: the Department has a long-standing policy of [...]
The UN Human Rights Council voted Friday to end the mandate of a group of seven human rights experts tasked with monitoring the rights situation in the Darfur region in Sudan. The council did, however, extend the mandate of its Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Sudan and adopted a resolution [...]
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf Friday promulgated an order to amend the Pakistani constitution, allowing the president to declare a state of emergency without parliamentary ratification and providing that any judge who has not taken an oath under the Oath of Office (Judges) Order, 2007 established under Musharraf's Provisional Constitution Order (PCO) ceased to hold office [...]
Jean-Marie Le Pen , leader of France's far-right National Front party , went on trial Friday for "complicity in contesting crimes against humanity and complicity in justifying war crimes." The charges stem from Le Pen's 2005 comments during an interview with the right-wing weekly magazine Rivarol that the World War II Nazi occupation of France [...]
The UK parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) Friday issued a report opposing a proposal by the government to extend the time limit on detaining terror suspects from 28 to 42 days. The JCHR concluded that the government had not made an adequate case for the increase and that:i) it can find no clear [...]
A court in Chad has set December 21 as the trial date for six French nationals connected with the abortive effort by French charity Zoe's Ark to airlift so-called "Darfur orphans" out of Chad to Europe. The six will be tried on kidnapping, fraud, and forgery charges. Zoe's Ark founder Eric Breteau said in a [...]
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Friday defended a Russian government directive earlier this week to shut down local offices of the British Council by January 1, saying that the offices in Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg were originally established in breach of international and Russian law. Russian authorities insist the Council has violated Russian tax laws. [...]
Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam Friday denied that Libya engages in torture in response to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by a Palestinian doctor detained in Libya after being accused of deliberately infected hundreds of children with the HIV virus. Ashraf Jima Hajuj filed the lawsuit against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi , as well as five [...]
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched a criminal probe of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) Stuart Bowen on allegations that he misappropriated taxpayer money to pay for his legal defense during a 2006 administrative probe and that he improperly accessed employees' emails, according to a Thursday report in CongressDaily. The [...]
