Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos said Thursday that media reports that US CIA planes had made secret illegal stops in Spain while carrying terror suspects were unjustified as the US stopovers were legal, but promised to check aircraft more closely in the future. Spain has already been investigating allegations of the secret landings in [...]
Former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet was formally charged with human rights violations Thursday and placed under house arrest on the heels of an unrelated indictment on corruption charges filed Wednesday on which he was granted bail. This time Pinochet has been charged in connection with the kidnapping and disappearance of six dissidents in 1974 [...]
A Senegal appeals court ruled Friday that it was "not competent" to extradite former Chad president Hissene Habre to Belgium to face charges of crimes against humanity – including some alleged 40,000 executions and the torture of over 200,000 people – committed during his 1982-90 rule of the African country. Habre has been living is [...]
Next Wednesday Robin Lovitt , 41, is slated to become the 1,000th person to be executed since the 10 year moratorium on capital punishment in the United States was lifted in 1977. He is convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a pool hall robbery in Virginia in 1998. Convicted killer Gary Gilmore [...]
French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy , widely seen as a leading candidate to replace President Jacques Chirac in 2007, is calling for new crime prevention legislation and affirmative action policies in the wake of widespread rioting by immigrant youths earlier this months that prompted the French government to declare a state of emergency . The [...]
Jose Padilla , a US citizen charged with planning to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the US, will not face those charges because US officials obtained evidence against him using torture on two al-Qaida members, according to a New York Times report. The Times Thursday quoted unnamed current and former government officials as saying [...]
Ugandan opposition leader Kizza Besigye , charged last week with treason by civilian prosecutors, was taken before a Ugandan military court Thursday to answer additional charges of terrorism and illegal firearms possession. Besignye, who had been scheduled to attend a bail hearing in the civilian High Court, refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the military [...]
Leading Friday's international brief, Kenyan legal experts have raised concerns that Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki acted illegally and unconstitutionally when he sacked all 29 ministers and their deputies within 24 hours of his draft constitution being rejected by Kenyan voters . Kenyan Attorney General Amos Wako defended Kibaki's actions as valid under the current Kenyan [...]
British families of soldiers killed in Iraq petitioned the UK High Court Thursday for permission to launch a legal challenge against the government's refusal to hold an independent inquiry into the country's involvement in the Iraq war. Their group, Military Families Against the War , which called for an inquiry in May, argues that the [...]
Syria has requested a formal "cooperation protocol" with the United Nations which would govern the country's assistance with a UN investigation into the death of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri . A draft given to the UN indicates that Syria wants chief UN investigator and German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis to only question suspects and [...]
