A majority of members of the Bolivian Constitutional Assembly on Sunday approved a new draft constitution Sunday, despite a boycott by members of the main opposition party. Only 153 of 255 assembly members voted in favor of the new constitution, falling short of the two-thirds majority the opposition says is necessary to approve changes to [...]
The US Supreme Court handed down decisions in three cases Monday, including Kimbrough v. United States , where the Court overturned a federal appeals court ruling on whether a federal judge has discretion to sentence a defendant to a prison term less than what is recommended by federal guidelines when the lower sentence "is based [...]
A Canadian jury convicted Robert William Pickton Sunday of second degree murder for the deaths of six women in the 1990s. He was found not guilty of first degree murder, with the jury concluding that the killings were not planned. Pickton, accused of murdering 26 women he had lured from Vancouver's seedy Downtown Eastside, pleaded [...]
Three new judges were appointed to the reconstituted Supreme Court of Pakistan Monday, bringing the regular membership of the court up to 14, including Chief Justice Abdul Hameed Dogar. Pakistan's Law Ministry said in a statement that the new judges are Justice Mian Hamid Farooq and Justice Syed Sakhi Hussain Bokhari of the Lahore High [...]
Lawyers for several detainees at Guantanamo Bay filed an emergency motion Sunday asking a federal judge to look into the CIA's destruction of videotapes showing the interrogations of terror suspects. CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged last week that the CIA had videotaped the interrogation of two suspects in 2002, but said that the tapes had [...]
A Chadian judge has determined that 10 defendants will stand trial in criminal court in connection with the abortive effort by French charity Zoe's Ark to airlift so-called "Darfur orphans" out of Chad , a lawyer told AFP Monday. The investigative judge said that six French Zoe's Ark workers should be tried in criminal court [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Benjamin Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law says that new revelations about top US lawmakers' encouragement and support of state-sponsored torture in the years immediately following 9/11 make them complicit in acts many would now condemn and show us how far we have sunk in ostensible defense of American [...]
Malaysian police detained 21 lawyers, activists and opposition figures Sunday after nationwide raids in response to continuing demonstrations against the country's government. The police arrested 12 members of an opposition coalition for participating in a November 10 rally for electoral reforms . The rally drew about 30,000 people and was part of a widening protest [...]
A lawyer for the first "high-value" Guantanamo Bay detainee to be allowed to meet privately with attorneys told AP Saturday that his client had been "subjected to state-sanctioned torture" in secret overseas CIA prisons. J. Wells Dixon has filed a federal court motion seeking an order directing the US government to preserve evidence of the [...]
The US Department of Justice and the CIA Inspector General announced Saturday they will conduct a joint preliminary investigation into the destruction of videotaped recordings of two terror suspects in 2005, which could then lead to a full investigation. The preliminary investigation will likely focus on whether Jose Rodriguez, the then-director of the National Clandestine [...]
