The US Senate early Saturday morning unanimously ratified the US-UK Extradition Treaty that was negotiated in 2003 and statutorily incorporated into UK law the same year. Earlier this year it was controversially used as the basis for extraditing three UK NatWest backers to the US to face charges in the Enron fraud scandal; a British [...]

Chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Carla Del Ponte challenged the European Union Friday to fund the war crimes court if UN monies runs dry before the ICTY is able to bring to trial the two most-wanted war criminals indicted by the court, former Bosnian Serb leaders Ratko Mladic and [...]

The US House of Representatives passed a property rights bill Friday night that its proponents say will provide easier access to federal courts for landowners seeking to challenge governmental actions under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. The Private Property Rights Implementation Act of 2006 , which the House initially failed to pass on [...]

The US Senate passed the Secure Fence Act of 2006 Friday by a vote of 80-19 , authorizing the construction of a 700-mile fence along the US-Mexico border . President Bush is expected to sign the measure, designed to curb illegal immigration into the United States. A key provision of the bill dictates that the [...]

Lawyers from several of the top US wireless telephone providers testified Friday at a hearing before the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee of the US House Energy and Commerce Committee that they would support legislation to ban pretexting , the practice whereby an individual poses as another customer to obtain his or her personal phone information. [...]

The US Congress sent its final version of the military commissions bill to President Bush late Friday after the House voted 250-170 to approve the Senate's version of the legislation . The House of Representatives had approved its own version of the bill Wednesday by a vote of 253-168 , but House leaders decided to [...]

Military Commissions Act of 2006 , passed by the US Senate September 28, 2006 and by the US House of Representatives September 29, 2006. Read the full text of the legislation . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Sandra Cote-Whitacre et al. v. Department of Public Health et al., Commonwealth of Massachusetts Suffolk County Superior Court, September 29, 2006 . Read the full text of the ruling . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The major political parties in Serbia have reached an agreement on the text of a draft constitution after weeks of negotiations, Local Government and Administration Minister Zoran Loncar said Friday. Although parliament is scheduled to consider the document on Saturday, few details about it have been made public. Earlier this month, the National Assembly of [...]

In his first major speech to parliament since taking office last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe followed through on a promise to make amending the country's pacifist constitution a priority. The constitution , effectively imposed on Japan after World War II by the United States, forbids in Aricle 9 "the threat or use of [...]