US Department of Defense documents released Friday chronicle multiple mistreatments of Iraqi prisoners by US personnel in 2003 and 2004 but stop short of labeling the instances of mistreatment illegal, describing them instead as "wrong." Over 1000 pages of US military documents handed over to the ACLU pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act request [...]
The UN Security Council on Friday unanimously agreed to a resolution authorizing the pending war crimes trial of ex-Liberian president Charles Taylor to be shifted from the facilities of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL} in Freetown, Sierra Leone, to the facilities of the International Criminal Court at The Hague in the Netherlands. The [...]
Nepal's government and the Maoist rebels on Friday agreed to draft an interim constitution within 15 days and dissolve the parliament reinstated by the popular people's uprising in April this year. Surprisingly, the Maoists , who have been waging a people's war over a decade, also agreed to go for a competitive multiparty democracy and [...]
Romania has concluded an investigation into alleged secret CIA prisons located near Romanian airports in Europe's "spider's web" of CIA rendition flights , finding no evidence that the country hosted secret prisons or cooperated in rendition flights. A committee of the Romanian Senate undertook the investigation in response to allegations leveled in a Council of [...]
During a two-day European Union summit in Brussels , German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters Friday that attempts to revive the European Constitution will be delayed until 2008 and won't occur during Germany's six-month presidency of the European Council as Germany had hoped. The proposed European Constitution , which requires unanimity for passage, was rejected [...]
The UK Foreign Office on Friday took control of the case of Australian David Hicks , an accused Taliban member who has been detained at the US detention center at Guantanamo Bay for over four years. The UK High Court has ruled that Britain should grant citizenship to Hicks because Hicks' mother is a British [...]
The kickback fraud case against leading class action law firm Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman has hit unexpected delays as five judges from the US District Court for the Central District of California , which covers Los Angeles, have recused themselves from the case. The five recusals have been attributed to owning stock in a [...]
US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) has threatened to subpoena administration documents on its warrantless domestic spying program if US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales does not respond to Specter's requests to answer questions on domestic spying and a host of other issues, including presidential signing statements and last month's FBI raid on Rep. [...]
The Colorado Court of Appeals ruled Thursday that a 15-year-old girl can enter into a common-law marriage, remanding a case involving the common-law marriage between a 38-year Willis Rouse and a teenage girl for a lower court to determine the validity of their marriage. The appellate court overruled a decision by a lower court that [...]
An appeals court in Japan on Friday dismissed the appeal of a lawsuit brought in 1997 by 42 Chinese plaintiffs against the Japanese government and ten Japanese corporations seeking compensation for forced labor, saying the statute of limitations has expired on claims arising out of events that happened during World War II. The Court acknowledged [...]
