Pakistan police closed off the capital of Islamabad on Thursday to prevent protesters from rallying against President Musharraf's bid for a second five-year term in office. Pakistani lawyers had threatened earlier in the week to defy a government ban on gatherings of more than five people to protest Musharraf's candidacy, which they call illegitimate as [...]
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe devoted much of his address to the 62nd UN General Assembly on Wednesday to attacking the human rights record of US President George W. Bush. Mugabe was responding to Bush's address , where Bush called Mugabe's government a "tyrannical regime" that has "cracked down on peaceful calls for reform, and forced [...]
Myanmar police arrested dozens of Buddhist monks during dawn raids on two monasteries Thursday, one day after police opened fire on anti-government protesters , killing at least eight and arresting over 300. Also Thursday, police again fired shots near crowds of protesters, killing one person. It is unclear whether the shots were aimed at or [...]
Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (INP) has begun officially publishing a list of public officials who worked with or were spied on by the country's Communist-era secret police as part of ongoing efforts to reconcile Poland's pre-1989 Communist heritage. Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and President Lech Kaczynski were both listed Tuesday as officials who [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Alison Nathan of Fordham University School of Law says that in the wake of the US Supreme Court's grant of certiorari in the Baze v. Rees Kentucky lethal injection case, the pending executions of inmates who have brought similar challenges should be put on hold… The U.S. Supreme Court made headlines on [...]
The US federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) said Wednesday that it will reshelve all religious material taken from prison chapel libraries originally determined to fall outside of the agency's approved list of materials. The BOP made the decision to temporarily end the Standardized Chapel Library Project in light of growing criticism from a wide spectrum [...]
A US district judge ruled Wednesday that two provisions of the USA Patriot Act that deal with physical search and electronic eavesdropping are unconstitutional. Brandon Mayfield , the Oregon attorney arrested and detained for two weeks in May 2004 after the FBI mistakenly concluded that his fingerprints matched those found on a bag containing detonators [...]
Somalia and Myanmar rank as the world's most corrupt nations in 2007 according to the latest annual Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index released Wednesday. The index ranked 180 countries based on observations by businesspeople and analysts, giving each a score between 1 and 10. Myanmar and Somalia tied for the lowest score of 1.4 out [...]
A Russian court began hearings against a renowned political commentator Tuesday, with prosecutors using expanded anti-extremism laws originally designed to combat racism and xenophobia but broadened in July to include activities taken for "political or ideological hatred." Prosecutors claim that several books by author Andrei Piontkovsky , a visiting fellow at Washington DC's Hudson Institute [...]
Violence erupted in Myanmar Wednesday as police opened fire on a crowd of 10,000 demonstrators, leaving as many as eight dead. Up to 300 protesters were arrested in the fray, including many Buddhist monks. The violence broke out just one day after the nation's military government banned public gatherings of more than five people and [...]
