Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi honored the country's war dead by praying at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine Monday, despite conflicting court decisions on the constitutionality of Koizumi's visits to the shrine. Last month, the Osaka High Court ruled that the visits violate constitutional provisions for the separation of church and state, but earlier this month, the [...]
US Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers will offer her first rebuttal to concerns over her qualifications Monday in answers to a Senate questionnaire on several topics, including judicial activism. White House strategists say that Miers' approach will be to reassure conservative critics while at the same time not drawing fire from the liberal opposition. Miers [...]
An official from Bali's Denpasar district court said Monday that politicians and legal officials will be sent to the prison which houses three men convicted in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings in an attempt to speed up their executions. In 2003, Amrozi bin Nurhasyim, Mukhlas and Imam Samudra were sentenced to death by firing squad [...]
The Egyptian government ordered Sunday that five members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood be released after they had been detained for five months without charges. The Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1928 and banned in 1954, renounced violence in the 1970s and is thought to be Egypt's largest Islamist group. The order comes after the recent [...]
The Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal (formerly known as the Iraqi Special Tribunal ), the court established to try Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi officials, could violate international standards for fair trials, according to a briefing paper, The Former Iraqi Government on Trial , released Sunday by Human Rights Watch . HRW warns that the [...]
A British Royal Air Force medical officer has become the first member of the UK military to face criminal charges for disobeying a lawful command because he refused to fight in Iraq, claiming the war there is illegal. Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, decorated from operations in Afghanistan and two previous tours in Iraq, will be court-martialed [...]
Muslim leaders and rights groups in Indonesia fear that plans to strengthen Indonesian anti-terror laws in the wake a of a second round of Bali bombings earlier this month will return the country to the days when former dictator Suharto used security forces to stifle dissent. Indonesia’s government Saturday tried to reassure citizens that the [...]
The UN human rights chief in Haiti said Friday that the human rights situation in the Caribbean nation had become "catastrophic". Thierry Fagart, who heads a team of some 30 UN observers, cited numerous violations of basic human rights, such as arbitrary arrests, torture and summary executions committed by Haitian National Police, and street violence [...]
Explicitly evoking images of Germany in the 1930s, senior British judges and lawyers are warning that the Blair government's efforts to put pressure on the judiciary in the interpretation of the Human Rights Act while restricting traditional civil liberties in anti-terror legislation risks turning the country into a police state. Former law lord Lord Ackner [...]
A spokesman for the UN-Afghan Joint Election Management Body said Sunday that "approximately 50" Afghan election workers had been dismissed under suspicion of fraud committed in last month's parliamentary elections . Some 680 ballot boxes alleged to have been stuffed – about 3% of the total – have been removed from the counting process. The [...]
