Thailand's military leaders decided Monday to lift martial law in 40 of the country's 76 provinces, pending the approval of Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont . Thailand has been under a state of martial law since the Thai military seized power from civilian prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a bloodless coup in September. The Council [...]
Saddam Hussein's genocide trial resumed Monday with testimony from witnesses describing how Hussein's soldiers executed civilians during the "Anfal" campaigns against ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq from 1987 to 1988. All seven defendants appeared in court, though several were represented by court-appointed lawyers while members of the defense team continue their boycott of the proceedings. [...]
Serbian war crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj failed to appear in court Monday as his trial began at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) . The court subsequently stripped Seselj of his right to represent himself and summoned court-appointed defense lawyers to represent him. Seselj, who has been on hunger strike for two [...]
Many of the efforts to soften the corporate accountability reforms of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act are being pushed by the same corporations that employed questionable accounting and business practices before the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, New York state attorney general and governor-elect Eliot Spitzer said in an interview with the Financial Times published Monday. Last week, US [...]
An Australian government commission investigating Australian participation in the now-defunct UN oil-for-food program in Iraq has recommended that criminal charges be brought against 12 business executives for paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's former regime . In a report formally submitted to Parliament Monday, the Cole Commission confirmed earlier UN reports that the Australian Wheat Board [...]
French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said Sunday that the issuance of arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan government officials relating to the 1994 plane crash of President Juvenal Habyariman was simply a judicial act by anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere and was not a political act endorsed by the French government. In a radio interview Douste-Blazy [...]
The chief prosecutor in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial said Sunday that audio tapes and documentation proving that Hussein personally ordered the 1988 gassing of Kurdish villagers will be submitted to the court hearing his case. Munqith al-Faroon told Reuters that he possesses tapes of meetings between Saddam and senior Baathist officials revealing that Hussein had [...]
Israel's High Court ruled Sunday that a proposed portion of Israel's Security Fence running north of Jerusalem is legal despite its segregation of five villages and about 1,500 Palestinians from the rest of Israel. Many of the villagers hold Israeli identification cards. Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote: e accept the State's position that there is [...]
UN Independent Expert on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in Liberia Charlotte Abaka, recently returned from an 11-day visit to that country, has called on the Liberian government to press ahead with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and appoint members to its Independent National Commission on Human Rights (INCHR). The TRC was [...]
Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet publicly assumed "full political responsibility" for the actions of his 1973-90 military regime in a statement released Saturday. The statement was read aloud by his wife at the celebration of Pinochet's 91st birthday, and marked the first time Pinochet has taken responsibility for his regime's actions, which included human rights [...]
