Egypt's Supreme Committee of Presidential Elections has rejected any international assistance in monitoring the upcoming presidential elections, the first multi-candidate election in Egypt's history. Committee spokesperson Osama Attawiya told the Kuwait News Agency Monday that under Egypt's constitution, only the judiciary had the ability to monitor the elections and that international monitoring would compromise the [...]
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Monday rejected a request by prosecutors to speed up the trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic . Milosevic's trial on charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity began in February 2002 and ICTY prosecutors had requested that the UN war crimes tribunal work four [...]
AP is reporting that a Sunni member of Iraq's constitutional committee has said that he doubts that a deal can be reached on an Iraqi constitution "in the next few hours." As previously reported on JURIST's Paper Chase, Shiite and Kurdish negotiators have indicated that they have agreed on a draft, but Sunni negotiators have [...]
Reuters is reporting Monday that a draft of Iraq's constitution calls the country a "republican, parliamentarian, democratic and federal" state, but fails to detail the extent of the federalism. The vague language may indicate a compromise between various ethnic groups, with Kurds and some Shiites pushing for a more federal form of government and Sunnis [...]
CT v. Spellings, State of Connecticut, August 22, 2005 . Read the full text of the complaint here . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
Iranian political prisoner, dissident journalist Akbar Ganji , has ended the hunger strike he began on June 11 to protest the conditions of his confinement, his wife confirmed Monday. The confirmation follows an earlier announcement from the Iranian judiciary that Ganji had called off his protest. Ganji was sentenced in 2001 to six years in [...]
The Arab Regional Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has issued a report saying the Yemen judiciary system and employment in the country's monitoring and control bodies is "infested with corruption." The report points to problems with the "fragile" judiciary, including lack of coordination between the government and law implementation, ineffectiveness of the [...]
Statistics from a new US Department of Justice report, Suicide and Homicide in State Prisons and Local Jails , reveal that prisoner death rates for homicide, suicide and AIDS have declined substantially in corrections facilities since 1980. Homicide rates in state prisons dropped by more than 90 percent, from 54 per 100,000 in 1980 to [...]
As Israeli forces work Monday to wrap-up the Gaza pullout , Israeli police commander Hagai Dotan announced the arrest of three young extremists who had come to Netzarim, one of Gaza's first settlements, to disrupt the evacuation. The three were detained after being found with metal spikes, oil, barbed wire and paint. Though the forcible [...]
A Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry official announced Monday that Kyrgyzstan will not return refugees who fled Uzbekistan after an uprising in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan in May. Zafar Hakimov, director of the Foreign Ministry's migration service department, said that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has granted asylum status to 439 of the 455 [...]
