Only 37 of over 5700 lawyers, rights activists, opposition figures and others arrested after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf issued a declaration of emergency rule earlier this month still remain in custody, Pakistani Interior Ministry spokesman Brig Javed Iqbal Cheema said Tuesday. Of those 37, 32 were arrested for violent or lawless activities and are facing [...]
A Vietnamese court on Tuesday reduced the prison terms of two human rights lawyers sentenced for spreading propaganda against the state. The lawyers, Nguyen Van Dai, 38, and Le Thi Cong Nhan, 28, were not released from custody, but the court lowered Dai's term from five years to four and Nhan's from four years to [...]
Texas oil tycoon Oscar Wyatt Jr. was sentenced Tuesday to one year in prison and ordered to pay over $11 million dollars in restitution for his role in the Iraq Oil-for-Food scandal . Originally accused of paying millions of dollars in illegal kickbacks to members of Saddam Hussein's regime in order to secure oil contracts [...]
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has indicated that he may accept most of the demands put forth by opposition parties in the face of his November 3 declaration of emergency rule but that he will not reinstate ousted Supreme Court justices, Pakistan's News daily reported Tuesday. Attorney General Malik Muhammad Qayyum and former railways minister Sheikh [...]
Peter Weiss and Jeanne Sulzer : "On October 26, while Donald Rumsfeld was attending a conference in Paris, a war crimes complaint based on his authorization for and encouragement of torture was filed against him by FIDH (Paris), the Center for Constitutional Rights (New York), the European Center for Human and Constitutional Rights (Berlin) and [...]
US State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger III Tuesday called for the international community to "clarify" Geneva Convention rules pertaining to treatment of detained terror suspects. Speaking to reporters at an International Committee of the Red Cross meeting, Bellinger said: Critics have suggested that the United States is backing away from the Geneva Conventions or [...]
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in New Jersey v. Delaware , 134, Orig., to revisit a century-old water boundary dispute between the two states. In 2005, New Jersey filed suit against Delaware over British Petroleum's (BP) plans to build a liquefied natural gas plant on New Jersey's side of the Delaware River. [...]
Authorities in Malaysia may rely on the country's controversial Internal Security Act (ISA) to halt protests, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi said Tuesday after Sunday demonstrations in Kuala Lumpur by thousands of the nation's ethnic Indians. The ISA is a preventive detention law that allows the Malaysian government to detain suspects for two years without trial [...]
A court in the Netherlands ruled Tuesday that the families of approximately 8,000 Bosnian Muslims who were killed in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre can proceed with their class action lawsuit against the United Nations and the Netherlands filed June 4, according to lawyer Marco Gerritsen, who represents approximately 6,000 family members of victims in the [...]
Anonymous : "The Lahore High Court on 27 Nov appears to have returned to normalcy; many people, many cars, many lawyers in their robes. Interestingly, resolutions have been passed by different legal forums including the LHC Bar Association validating a boycott of the new breed of judges, the PCO Judges who have sworn oaths under [...]
