In a victory for German Chancellor Angela Merkel , a package of constitutional reforms aimed at separating and clarifying the powers of the federal and state governments passed Germany's lower house of parliament in a 428-162 vote Friday, with three lawmakers abstaining. After World War II, Germany's government was organized under an inefficient system of [...]
A federal judge has extended a temporary restraining order preventing the state of Georgia from fully enforcing a law that restricts where convicted sex offenders can live. The restraining order issued Monday applied only to the eight plaintiffs in the case, but US District Judge Clarence Cooper in the Northern District of Georgia extended the [...]
The Turkish Grand National Assembly broadened the country's anti-terror laws Thursday by adopting new legislation that delays a suspect's guaranteed access to a lawyer for the first 24 hours of detention and expands the definition of offenses classified as terrorism. New acts classified as terrorism include human trafficking, drug smuggling, obstruction of education, influencing tenders, [...]
The French Senate and National Assembly gave final approval Friday to the so-called "iTunes" copyright legislation , meaning the bill will soon become law assuming the failure of a constitutional challenge filed last week by the Socialist party. The government still has the option of amending the bill before it is signed. Though the original [...]
The US House of Representatives voted 232-187 Thursday to approve the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act , which "provide for exploration, development, and production activities for mineral resources on the Outer Continental Shelf ." The bill, a version of which was approved in a House committee in October, would end the offshore drilling moratorium on [...]
Former East Timor Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri , who resigned on Monday , on Friday refused to respond to a prosecutor's summons to appear for questioning in connection with allegations that he organized and armed a private militia. Instead, Alkatiri wrote a letter back to prosecutors saying he is waiting for his lawyer, and that [...]
The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) has adopted the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples , a document which asserts that indigenous peoples worldwide should have the right to restitution of land and resources taken from them. Bypassing objections from Canada and Russia, the HRC voted by a margin of 30-2 to approve [...]
Australian Prime Minister John Howard said Friday that he wants Australian-born terror suspect David Hicks to be tried in American courts even after the US Supreme Court on Thursday struck down military commissions set up to try terror suspects detained at the US detention center in Guantanamo Bay . Hicks, captured in Afghanistan by US [...]
Ta Mok , the former military chief of the Khmer Rouge communist movement in Cambodia who was indicted on crimes against humanity charges in 1999 and has been in detention since 2002, demanded a swift trial Friday. An unexpected hospitalization has renewed fears that he will not live through the end of his trial before [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University School of Law says that the correlation between a newly-documented drastic decline in sexual violence in the United States and a major increase in social access to pornography – most recently over the Internet – casts doubt on widely-accepted government findings on the causal connection between pornography [...]
