Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo Thursday declared a state of emergency in the Nigerian state of Ekiti after Governor Ayodele Fayose was impeached by state lawmakers earlier this week following his conviction for corruption charges. Obasanjo called Fayose's removal unconstitutional because lawmakers replaced the chief judge who had been presiding over Fayose's corruption trial. After confusion [...]
A former guard at the Nazi Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria has been released from a Michigan jail after Germany, Romania and Hungary all refused to take custody of him, according to a spokesman for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) . Johann Leprich, 81, joined the Waffen-SS and worked as a guard at [...]
The United States Marshall's Services Management of the Justice Prisoner and Alien Transportation System, US Department of Justice, October 18, 2006 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
In a joint news conference Wednesday with Moqtada al-Sadr , a militant Shiite cleric and head of the Mehdi Army militia, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki expressed hope for speedy proceedings against former president Saddam Hussein and proclaimed that “God willing the death sentence verdict will be issued soon against the tyrant Saddam and his [...]
Members of an Ethiopian inquiry team charged with investigating violent mass demonstrations following the May 2005 elections and separate protests about ballot fraud in November 2005 announced Wednesday that 193 civilians were killed by Ethiopian security forces during the violence, nearly three times the official number reported by the government. Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi [...]
A US district court judge from the Northern District of Texas has ruled that the one-year statute of limitations for bringing libel suits in Texas applies equally to articles posted on the Internet and articles in print. In dismissing a lawsuit against the Dallas Morning News , columnist Scott Burns, , and parent company Belo [...]
A military court in Jordan found eight Islamic militants guilty Wednesday of plotting to attack Americans and Israelis in Jordan and of planning to kill US forces being trained in both Jordan and Iraq. The convicted eight, including three still at large, were reportedly part of Al-Taa'efa al-Mansourah , a group purported to have been [...]
Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet told federal judge Alejandro Solis during a meeting Wednesday that he neither participated in nor was aware of the torture of thousands of citizens at Villa Grimaldi prison , the infamous political detention center allegedly operated by Pinochet’s secret police in Chile between 1974 and 1977. Solis, who reportedly plans [...]
A civil court in Berlin Wednesday dismissed two claims against a German distributor of the drug Vioxx , manufactured by US pharmaceutical firm Merck & Co. , citing plaintiffs' failures in both cases to demonstrate a causal connection between the drug and symptoms. The court held that "expressing a vague suspicion is not enough" in [...]
Plans for the organization of a national human rights commission in Iraq were announced Wednesday by members of the Iraqi parliament at a workshop sponsored by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) . The proposed commission, supported by many Iraqi political parties, will employ nine persons selected by the Iraqi parliament to monitor [...]
