The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has denied prosecutors' request to transfer the trial of Rwandan genocide suspect Michel Bagaragaza to Norway because Norway does not have a specific law against genocide. In its decision , the UN-backed court said: In this case, it is apparent that the Kingdom of Norway does not have jurisdiction [...]
UK Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith is to meet with senior Israeli officials Thursday to discuss whether Israeli soldiers should be charged with war crimes for shooting two Britons in 2003. The families of James Miller, an award-winning cameraman, and Tom Hurndall, a peace activist, have asked Goldsmith to prosecute the Israeli soldiers under the [...]
Court-martial proceedings against US Army Sgt. Santos A. Cardona began Monday on charges of maltreatment of prisoners, dereliction of duty and assault connected to Cardona's alleged use of unmuzzled dogs when questioning detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison . A second dog handler, Sgt. Michael Smith, was convicted earlier this year and sentenced to six [...]
Election officials in Montenegro said Monday that over 55 percent of voters in Sunday's referendum endorsed seceding from Serbia and forming an independent nation. Montenegro's State Electoral Commission said that 55.4 percent of voters supported independence in a majority vote that required 55 percent to win. Some Montenegrin leaders had criticized the 55 percent threshold, [...]
Chief Justice John Roberts wants greater consensus between justices on the US Supreme Court and hopes to decide issues on very narrow grounds in order to avoid unnecessary controversy. In a commencement address to Georgetown Law Center graduates on Sunday, Roberts said: If it is not necessary to decide more to a case, then in [...]
The US Supreme Court on Monday ruled that police can enter a home without a warrant when they have not knocked or announced their presence if they have an objectively reasonable basis to believe that someone inside the home has been seriously injured or there is an imminent threat of injury. In Brigham County v. [...]
US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Sunday that the US does not need to make English the "national language" and that a Senate move to add English language amendments to an immigration reform proposal was symbolic. In an interview on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Gonzales said that the Senate's amended version of the immigration bill [...]
The US prison and jail population added prisoners from mid-2004 to mid-2005 at a rate of 2.6 percent and more than 1,000 new inmates a week, reaching a total of 2,186,230 inmates behind bars according to a Justice Department Bureau of Justice Statistics report released Sunday. Prisons received 1.4 million of the new prisoners, while [...]
US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that the government has authority to prosecute journalists for publishing classified material under several "statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility." In an appearance on ABC's "This Week" Sunday, Gonzales said that journalists' obligations to national [...]
FBI agents videotaped US Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA) last August accepting $100,000 in cash as a bribe from wealthy businesswoman Lori Mody for a Nigerian official, according to an FBI affidavit made public Sunday. Mody was actually working as an FBI informant and FBI agents later found $90,000 of the cash in Jefferson's freezer. The [...]
