[JURIST] Election officials announced Saturday that citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo [JURIST news archive] approved a new constitution [draft text in French; AP summary] in a referendum [JURIST report] held December 18. The charter is designed to bring peace to the country after five years of war and provides for national elections to be held next year. International observers declared the vote to have been free and fair [Reuters report] but "no" vote supporters have vowed to appeal the result of 83% in favor, alleging unfair support for the "yes" side from the international community. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] The US military will not transfer detainees [JURIST news archive] to Iraqi-operated prisons or transition US-run facilities to Iraqi control until military officials are satisfied that Iraqis have met US standards for the treatment of detainees, according to Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, commanding US-run prisons in Iraq. The decision was made after two raids of Iraqi run facilities [JURIST report] earlier this months uncovered abused prisoners. At the same time, however, officers have voiced concerns about the growing inmate population and overcrowding at Iraq's four American-run prisons, which are currently operating at 119% capacity and challenged by a backlog in the country's fledgling judicial system. Earlier this year overcrowding was said to have contributed to several riots [JURIST report] and disturbances at US-run detention centers. The US military has begun inspecting Iraqi prisons for signs of abuse, but has not set a timetable for transitioning the facilities to Iraqi control. The New York Times has more.

Previously in JURIST's Paper Chase:

• Iraq detainee abuse problem worse than reported, US ambassador says
  
• Iraq rights ministry finds abused detainees in Baghdad facility
• Top US general aware of torture by Iraqi security forces
• Iraq government says abuse investigation stalled by US errors
• US general blames Iraqi commanders for detainee abuse
• UN rights commissioner calls for international inquiry into Iraqi prisons
• Iraqi government admits security forces tortured, abused detainees
• Military official confirms detainee abuse by Iraqi security forces
• US army warns Iraqi forces on detainee abuse

[JURIST] An Iraqi court ruled Saturday that some 100 as-yet-publicly-unspecified candidates - most believed to be Sunnis - who ran in the December 15 Iraqi parliamentary elections will be struck and not allowed to serve in the next national assembly due to previous associations with Saddam Hussein's now-defunct Baath Party [BBC backgrounder]. Commentators fear the decision will further polarize Iraqi politics at a time when many Sunnis still support the insurgency. The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq [official website] is still counting ballots and expects to have results available by next month, but preliminary counts [IECI partial uncertified results] show many popular Sunni politicians, including several candidates on US-supported former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's ticket, were in the lead before the ruling was announced. The Iraqi government's DeBaathification Commission [official website] had submitted a list of 185 former party members to the election committee with directions not to allow their candidacies, pursuant to election rules [Iraqi election law text, PDF] stating that if candidates had reached a certain level within the Baath Party, they would be banned if they had not renounced their former association; some candidates voluntarily withdrew their names, and many on the list were removed from consideration by the court ruling. Many Sunnis claimed election fraud [JURIST report] after partial election results revealed that they had won fewer parliamentary seats than had been hoped. Knight-Ridder has more. Aljazeera offers additional coverage.

[JURIST] The government of Peru has approved 12 of the 17 charges proposed by the country's Supreme Court against former president Alberto Fujimori [personal website; JURIST news archive], currently detained in Chile after being arrested [JURIST report] there in November when he returned from self-imposed exile in Japan. Peru is expected to file an extradition request with Chile before the January 6 legal deadline; a previous government request to launch an extradition bid was denied [JURIST report] by Peru's own Supreme Court because the proposed charges did not satisfy the requirements of the extradition treaty between Peru and Chile. Fujimori was president of Peru from 1990 until 2000 before fleeing the country for Japan during a corruption scandal. He currently faces charges of corruption, authorizing an illegal death squad, and abuse of power stemming from his term in office, but insists that he wants to run for president against despite a recent Constitutional Court ruling barring him [JURIST report]. BBC News has more.

[JURIST] French Judge Brigitte Raynaud has decided to open a formal investigation into accusations that French soldiers may have acted in complicity with Hutu militias who killed between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide [HRW backgrounder]. Several Rwandan survivors filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] against the French government in February of this year, alleging that French soldiers deployed in southwestern Rwanda to protect the Tutsis allowed Hutu militia members to enter the camps to massacre them. The French government has officially denied the claims, and a French parliamentary panel in 1998 found the French military innocent of any wrongdoing. Last year, however, Rwanda's Tutsi President Paul Kagame [BBC profile] accused the French military of training and arming the Hutu militias [JURIST report] responsible for the massacre, and an independent group of liberal French human rights advocates, lawyers, and historians reported that the French military helped the Hutus more than the Tutsis they were charged with protecting. The UN-supported International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) [official website] has yet to charge any French officials or soldiers for involvement, but Rwanda's envoy to the tribunal said in April that the ICTR has collected evidence sufficient to support the allegations [afrol article] but was hesitating to do so for fear of provoking a "diplomatic incident." AP has more.

[JURIST] UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour [official website] has again cautioned the Uzbekistan government to observe fair-trial standards after Uzbek courts sentenced another 42 people to 12-20 years in prison [JURIST report] during closed hearings Wednesday. Arbour, concerned that the latest trials may have been plagued by the same problems as previous trials [JURIST report], including inadequate counsel provided to defendants and potentially inconclusive or coerced evidence in support of the convictions, called on Uzbekistan to abide by the UN fair-trial rules [UN News report] they agreed upon when joining the organization. Uzbekistan rejected Arbour's attempt to have a monitor present for the latest proceedings. The 42 people were convicted in connection with the May Andijan uprising [JURIST news archive], where thousands of protesters gathered [JURIST report] after rebels stormed a prison and released a group of businessmen being held for trial for alleged Muslim extremism. Human rights groups allege that over 500 protesters were killed when Uzbek troops opened fire on the the crowd, though the government claims that only 187 died. AP has more.

[JURIST] The United Kingdom and Lebanon [JURIST news archive] have signed a memorandum of understanding that specifies that non-UK citizens deported from Britain to Lebanon will not be mistreated. According to a foreign office spokesperson in London, the agreement seeks to protect the human rights of any person deported to Lebanon through the courts and independent monitoring, and is intended to be applied to persons involved in potential terrorist activity. Amnesty International [official website] has condemned the agreement as "not worth the paper it is written on," insisting that "torture, suspicious deaths in custody and the use of the death penalty are all matters of serious concern in Lebanon." Manfred Nowak, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture [official website] has criticized similar agreements [JURIST report] between the UK and Libya [JURIST report] and Jordan [JURIST report] respectively, saying that they circumvent the absolute prohibition in the Convention against Torture [text] against the forcible return of detainees to countries where there is a risk of torture or ill-treatment. UK Prime Minister Tony Blair [official profile] has said he wants to sign as many as 10 assurance agreements with Muslim nations to speed up the deportation process for suspects accused of terrorist activities in the UK after the July 7 London bombings [JURIST news archive]. Read the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office press statement on the signing. AFP has more.

[JURIST] Former Egyptian presidential challenger and Al-Ghad opposition party leader Ayman Nour [JURIST news archive; Wikipedia profile] was sentenced Saturday to five years in prison on charges that he forged signatures required for his name to be on presidential ballots. Nour's lawyer said "This is a political verdict that will be annulled by the appeal court." Nour, himself a lawyer, has been on a hunger strike for two weeks to protest the decision in his case, which he claims to be a politically motivated attempt to remove him from Egyptian politics. During the trial, one of the six co-defendants claimed that his confession implicating Nour was coerced by security officials. Nour intends to run again in the next presidential election six years from now, after being defeated, 88.6 percent to 7.5 percent, by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak [official profile] in September elections [JURIST report]. Aljazeera has more.

[JURIST] National Security Agency [official website] technicians have been analyzing large volumes of phone and internet traffic information going through American telecomunications data hubs as part of the warrantless surveillance program authorized by President Bush [JURIST report] to identify individuals having connections to Al Qaeda, according to officials quoted by the New York Times in a report published Saturday. The information gathered from telecommunications companies has been used to determine patterns, such as who is calling whom from Afghanistan, how long these calls last, and what time of day such calls are usually made. Due to America's technological capacity, many international calls are routed through "switches" in the US, and in the last few years the US government has been "quietly encouraging" US companies to increase their switching capacity so that more international calls are routed through American locations. It is unclear whether laws enacted in the 1970's such as the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act [text] require warrants for accessing this type of non-domestic information. If these calls were made within the US, this type of "pattern analysis" would usually require a warrant.

[JURIST] A spokesman for the Iraqi High Criminal Court (formerly the Iraqi Special Tribunal [official website]) trying Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants said Saturday that a Kurdish investigative judge for the tribunal had been targeted in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. Munir Hadad [JURIST report; Al-Arabiya TV interview transcript], one of 20 investigative judges, was going through a Baghdad neighborhood Friday in an escorted security convoy when it was attack by armed men. Several vehicles were damaged, but no one was hurt. Iraqi soldiers are reported to have apprehended the attackers. Hadad has not yet been heavily involved in the trial and his role in the current proceedings - now adjourned to January 24 - is unclear. Aljazeera has more.

[JURIST] An FBI official Friday confirmed a US News and World Report article claiming that since 9/11 the US government has been clandestinely monitoring radiation levels at over 100 Muslim locations in the Washington DC area - including mosques, businesses and honmes - in search of nuclear bombs. Monitoring had also been conducted in Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York and Seattle in association with elevated threat levels. The magazine reported that the FBI, in conjunction with the US Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST) [DoE order], was monitoring 120 DC sites per day using three vehicles, most of the targets being Muslim sites identified by the FBI. According to one official involved in the searches, "the targets were almost all U.S. citizens. A lot of us thought it was questionable, but people who complained nearly lost their jobs. We were told it was perfectly legal." The FBI has said that because the air monitoring was done from publicly accessible areas, no warrants were needed, and none were requested. In 2001, however, the US Supreme Court held 5-4 in Kyllo v. US [opinion syllabus; full text] that using a thermal imaging device from a publically acessible area to search the home of a person suspected of growing marijuana was an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. A US Department of Justice spokesperson responded to disclosure of the FBI program by saying that the Bureau "monitors the air for imminent threats to health and safety, but acts only on specific information about a potential attack without targeting any individual or group." A federal official speaking on condition of anonymity indicted said he understood that the monitoring program "had been stopped or significantly rolled back" as early as eight months ago. AP has more.