Wednesday's Council of Europe (COE) report accusing 14 European countries of taking an active or passive role in a "global spider's web" of secret CIA prisons and rendition flights has drawn sharp rebukes from the US, the UK, and Poland, all of which were targets of criticism. The United States Wednesday called the report by [...]

Human Rights Watch accused Sudan's Special Criminal Court on the Events in Darfur of failing to accomplish its mission of prosecuting war crimes, in a briefing paper released Thursday. In a press release , a senior HRW counsel said the court has only prosecuted petty offenses while failing to address the widespread and ongoing human [...]

In retaliation for a travel ban imposed on several Belarus leaders by the European Union and the United States , Belarus Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Popov said Thursday that Belarus will impose retaliatory travel bans on foreign officials supporting the travel bans, and also threatened to ban US and Canadian aircraft from flying over the [...]

A Russia-based international human rights group claimed Wednesday that it has turned over to authorities documentary proof of the existence of Russian-operated secret prisons in Chechnya which the group claimed to have discovered in a southern district of Grozny, the capital city. Memorial said they have submitted to prosecutors photographs and videos of the prison [...]

The Canadian government intends to introduce new anti-terror legislation this fall that would fight money laundering and the financing of terrorism, particularly in the area of diamond sales, the Globe and Mail reported Thursday. The legislation is expected to incorporate the recommendations of a government consultation paper published last year that suggests that Canadian precious [...]

The US Department of Justice has said it will seek to dismiss 20 lawsuits accusing telecommunications companies Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth of illegally providing customer phone records to the National Security Agency in conjunction with the NSA's domestic surveillance program . In a filing made in the US District Court for the Northern District of [...]

Two British soldiers who were found not guilty by a military tribunal in the 2003 drowning of a 15-year-old Iraqi boy may resign from service to protest the UK's prosecution of the case. The two soldiers say that "wetting" looters in Basra was standard practice, encouraged by superior officers, and that they were merely following [...]

A prominent British medical ethicist is advocating the legalization of euthanasia, including for patients incapable of consent. Len Doyal , emeritus professor of medical ethics at Queen Mary, University of London, writes in this month's issue of Clinical Ethics that physicians cause some patients to suffer a "slow and distressing death" by withdrawing feeding tubes. [...]

The US House of Representatives has voted 379-35 to pass the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act , a bill which would increase the maximum indecency fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission from $32,500 to $325,000 per station for each violation. The House version approved late Wednesday Tuesday is identical to the version passed by the [...]

A federal judge in Oregon allowed a sexual abuse lawsuit against the Catholic Church to move forward Wednesday, rejecting the Vatican's bid to dismiss the suit for lack of jurisdiction. The ruling allows a Seattle-area man to continue with his claim that the Holy See is liable for transferring the Rev. Andrew Ronan from Ireland [...]