Key US senators from both political parties and White House cabinet officers reached a tentative agreement on immigration reform on Thursday, after weeks of negotiations. The proposal, which President Bush calls "secure, productive, orderly, and fair" , gives more weight to an immigrant's education level than his family connections in the US when awarding green [...]
A lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney urged a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit brought by former CIA operative Valerie Plame against members of the Bush administration, arguing that the lawsuit is based on "fanciful claims." Plame filed the lawsuit last year, alleging that White House officials violated her constitutional rights to free speech, [...]
Australian authorities have released British-born Jack Roche on parole 3 years after sentencing him in 2004 to nine years in prison for plotting to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Canberra , according to Thursday media reports. Roche must now regularly report to police. Born in England, Roche traveled to Afghanistan and met with Osama [...]
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour Thursday denounced the poor conditions of prisons in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during a visit there, deploring in particular overcrowding and inadequate access to justice. Three thousand people are imprisoned at the CPRK (Centre Penitentiare et de Réeducation de Kinshasa), the largest prison in DRC's [...]
Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) , the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, predicted Thursday that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will resign from his post at the conclusion of current investigations into the allegedly-political firings of federal prosecutors . Specter's comments followed others made by Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) Wednesday, who suggested that by remaining [...]
Ivan Dombrovsky, chairperson of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine , resigned without elaboration Thursday as the 18-judge court continued to deliberate the constitutionality of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko's April 2 decree dissolving parliament and calling for new elections. The Constitutional Court has appointed Deputy Chair Valery Pshenichny to be the new chief justice. Pshenichny was [...]
The UK Court of Appeal Thursday restored a control order on a terrorist suspect identified only as "E". The court held that a prior ruling wrongly required Home Secretary John Reid to consider the judgments of a Belgian court when determining whether there was sufficient evidence to support a criminal indictment against E. The court [...]
The African Commission on Human and People's Rights will review alleged human rights violations committed by Zimbabwe after African non-governmental organizations placed the issue on the agenda of ACHPR's 41st session, which began Wednesday. In an interview with VOA News, Wilbert Mandinde, legal advisor to the Zimbabwe Chapter of the Media Institute of Southern Africa [...]
The British House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee released a report Wednesday recommending that the government "bring forward proposals" to the European Commission "for an extension of copyright term for sound recordings to at least 70-years." The current British audio recordings copyright limit is limited to 50 years from the time of the [...]
The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area (LCCR) filed a lawsuit against the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) Wednesday requesting the public disclosure of a terrorist watch list containing more than 6,000 names. LCCR requested the document in 2005, and maintains that there is no legal [...]
