The chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay denied Tuesday that detainees at the facility were tortured, but acknowledged the vagueness of the definition of torture itself. USAF Col. Morris Davis of the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions will prosecute 10 Guantanamo detainees. Davis said in an AP interview before a talk at [...]
Serbian officials have criticized prison officials from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for failing to prevent the suicide of Milan Babic , former wartime leader of Croatia's rebel Serbs during the Balkan wars. Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic said that ICTY prison authorities bear the responsibility for the suicide happening in their [...]
The US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will vote in April on legislation to improve port security at American ports, according to committee chair Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) . Collins hopes that the recent controversy over the purchase of control of several major US ports by Dubai-based DP World will encourage passage of [...]
Leading Wednesday's international brief, a bill passed by the out-going Fatah party in the Palestinian Authority which granted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas greater presidential powers, including the power to set up a constitutional court staffed by judges picked by the president, has been referred to the Palestinian Supreme Court. The referral follows heated debates in [...]
Appellate judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on Wednesday reduced the sentence of former Bosnian Serb army commander Momir Nikolic to 20 years, saying the lower chamber erred by failing to recognize Nikolic's cooperation with prosecutors. As part of a plea agreement , Nikolic pleaded guilty in 2003 to one count [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist William Banks of Syracuse University College of Law says that even if legal authority is found for the NSA domestic surveillance program, such spying still violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution protecting Americans against unreasonable search and seizure… The political minuet being performed in recent weeks between angry members of [...]
JURIST Special Guest Columnist Brian Concannon Jr., Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, says that Haitian President-elect Rene Preval faces a daunting if familiar series of legal obstacles involving parliament, the judiciary and the police as he attempts to move forward with economic and social reforms following his latest election victory… [...]
Majority Republicans on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence agreed Tuesday to establish a new seven-member subcommittee to oversee surveillance methods utilized by President George W. Bush's domestic spying program , but passed up a proposed full-scale investigation of National Security Agency eavesdropping on US citizens. Democrats on the Committee opposed the oversight plan [...]
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan questioned the legality of the "arbitrary detention" of thousands of Iraqis by Coalition and Iraqi forces in his latest periodic report to the UN Security Council on the situation in Iraq released Tuesday. Annan suggested that although international law allows for internment in situations requiring 'imperative reasons of security', actions by [...]
UK Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells has warned that operations at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba threaten democracy and has urged the closing of the facility in order to restore faith in the "shared values" of Britain and the US. The outspoken minister, charged with overseeing British policy in the Middle East [...]
