[JURIST] Serge Brammertz [official profile, JURIST news archive], deputy prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and head of the UN International Independent Investigation Commission [UN materials] probing the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri [JURIST news archive], delivered the panel's latest report to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan [official profile, JURIST news archive] on Saturday and noted that Syria's cooperation with the probe has been "generally satisfactory." Brammertz's report indicates that the UNIIIC has made "considerable progress" but also supports extending the commission's mandate for another year to allow for "the strengthening or exclusion of some of the existing case hypotheses." The UN Security Council [official website] is scheduled to take up the report on June 14.

Syria's cooperation has been an issue in the commission's investigation and the Security Council passed a resolution [text] last October demanding Syria's cooperation with the Hariri probe [JURIST report]. After initially refusing to meet with investigators, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad [BBC profile] and other top Syrian officials met with Brammertz [JURIST report] in April. Prior commission reports have implicated Syrian officials in the assassination [JURIST report]. Detlev Mehlis, the German prosecutor who headed the probe until resigning at the end of 2005, has also said that he is "convinced" that Syrian authorities are responsible for Hariri's death [JURIST report]. Aljazeera has more.

6/14/06 11:51 AM ET - The Fourth report of the International Independent Investigation Commission [PDF] is now available.

[JURIST] The US Army has announced that three as-yet-unidentified Guantanamo detainees died early this morning local time in apparent multiple suicides. An official investigation is already underway. These are the first suicides confirmed among prisoners at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] since the facility housing US terror suspects at the naval station there was opened in 2002. A US Southern Command [official website] statement released in Miami says:

Two Saudis and one Yemeni, each located in Camp 1, were found unresponsive and not breathing in their cells by guards. Medical teams responded quickly and all three detainees were provided immediate emergency medical treatment in attempts to revive them.

The three detainees were pronounced dead by a physician after all lifesaving measures had been exhausted. The names of the deceased are not being released. The State Department notified and is in ongoing discussions with the governments of Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

The remains of the deceased detainees are being treated with the utmost respect. A cultural advisor is assisting the Joint Task Force to ensure that the remains are handled in a culturally and religiously appropriate manner.

The U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) has initiated an investigation, per standard operating procedure, to determine the cause and manner of death.

[JURIST] Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas [BBC profile] on Saturday set July 26 as the date for a referendum [JURIST report] in which Palestinians will vote on whether to establish a Palestinian state and implicitly recognize Israel. Palestinians will vote on the "national reconciliation" document [text; summary], which was written by detainees from Palestinian factions who are serving time in Israeli jails. The document calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state on land captured by Israel during the 1967 Mideast War [Wikipedia backgrounder].

Earlier this week, Abbas extended a deadline he had set for the governing Hamas party [ICT profile] to accept the proposed document. A Hamas spokesman in Gaza said, however, that the party would not accept the referendum decision and that it is presently "studying its options." Abbas said he planned to go to Gaza to encourage the factions to reopen their dialogue, and if the sides came to an agreement, the referendum would be cancelled. AP has more.

[JURIST] The number of worldwide refugees reached its lowest number since 1980 [UNHCR press release] in 2005, but the overall number of internally displaced people in the world has increased dramatically, according to a report [text, PDF] released Friday by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) [official website]. In 2005, 8.4 million people were counted as refugees, which is a drop from 9.5 million in 2004. However, the number of displaced people due to internal country conflicts increased from 5.4 million in 13 countries in 2004 to 6.6 million in 16 countries in 2005. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres [official profile] cited Darfur, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo [JURIST news archives] as countries with high displacement rates that must work to remedy the situation. UNHCR officials continue to attribute the decline in asylum seekers [Reuters report] to the imposition of tighter asylum restrictions in industrialized countries [JURIST report].

The UNHCR report counts 20.8 million people as the total population of concern in 2005, which includes refugees, internally displaced people, returned refugees, returned displaced individuals, asylum seekers, and stateless individuals. Five countries top the list of concern - Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia. The Angola Press has more.

[JURIST] An internal report [text] conducted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia [official website] and released Friday has concluded that UN authorities were not at fault and there was no criminal conduct [press release] in the March 5 suicide [JURIST report] of Croatian Serb leader Milan Babic [ICTY case backgrounder]. The investigation began after Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic [official profile] claimed that UN authorities were responsible for the suicide by failing to prevent it and demanded that a thorough investigation take place [JURIST report]. ICTY vice president Judge Kevin Parker [ICTY profile] stated that there were no signs that Babic would commit suicide.

Babic was convicted in 2004 for his involvement with ethnic cleansing during the Balkan wars instigated by former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic [JURIST news archive], who also died in ICTY custody in March before his trial concluded. Babic was serving a 13-year sentence [JURIST report] after pleading guilty under a plea agreement [text] in exchange for aiding prosecutors in other cases. AP has more.

[JURIST] A federal appeals court ruled [opinion, PDF] Friday to suppress three documents which contained information that the US Department of the Interior [official website] allegedly destroyed documents related to a class-action lawsuit brought by Native Americans [DOI Indian Trust Fund website], who claim they are owed tens of billions of dollars. The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit ten years ago, accusing the government of mismanaging an Indian trust [advocacy website; JURIST news archive] in their names for a period of 120 years. The suppressed documents were written by Alan Balaran, who was appointed in 1999 as a "special master" to oversee the exchange of information between the parties.

Balaran personally visited Indian reservations and federal depositories during his tenure and claimed that Interior Department officials neglected to report problems and also destroyed documents, sometimes purposefully. But the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit [official website] allowed the reports to be suppressed due to Balaran's hiring of a former Interior Department contractor who had previously accused the department of fraud. The expert was able to edit Balaran's reports, which the court determined was a "biased way of conducting and reporting upon an investigation." Balaran resigned [press release] as special master in April 2004, claiming that the Bush administration had been pursuing his recusal to silence criticisms of the Department of Interior’s handling of individual Indian trust accounts, and alleging that the administration knowingly allowed energy companies to pay Indians far less than non-Indians for oil, gas and other leases. AP has more.

[JURIST] The US Food and Drug Administration [official website] said Friday that new rules [press release] requiring wholesalers to be able to track prescription drugs will take effect in December. The rules stem from the Prescription Drug Marketing Act of 1987 [summary], a law aimed at combating drug counterfeiting [FDA backgrounder]. The FDA has so far been unable to fully enforce this law due to a lack of practical means to do so. Certain regulations requiring distributors to document the "pedigree" of drug products [draft compliance policy guide] had been delayed due to a concern about their impact on small wholesalers, but in a report [text] Friday, the FDA said that "it can no longer justify not implementing these regulations." The advent of radio frequency identification tags technology (RFID) [Wikipedia backgrounder] now allows wholesalers to more effectively and efficiently track individual bottles.

According to the World Health Organization [official website], counterfeiting involves between 8 and 10 percent of all drugs sold. FDA acting Commissioner Dr. Andrew C. von Eschenbach [official profile] has said that the use of RFID tags will help to reduce the risk that these counterfeit drugs will enter the US market. The New York Times has more.

[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Friday to allow two anti-abortion health care groups to intervene in a California lawsuit [complaint, PDF] regarding the federal Weldon Amendment [backgrounder], which prohibits federal money from going to federal, state and local governments that discriminate against health care service providers not offering abortion [JURIST news archive] services. The California health code may be interpreted to mandate emergency abortion services, so California Attorney General Bill Lockyer [official website] brought the lawsuit [press release] claiming the Weldon Amendment is unconstitutional in an attempt to protect federal funding for those emergency situations.

The Alliance for Catholic Health Care [advocacy website] and the Medical Groups, which represents anti-abortion health organizations, both petitioned to join the Bush administration in defending the amendment, and the three-judge panel of the court allowed the groups to intervene due to the consequences to health care practitioners if the amendment is found to be unconstitutional, saying "Congress passed the Weldon Amendment precisely to keep doctors who have moral qualms about performing abortions from being put to the hard choice of acting in conformity with their beliefs, or risking imprisonment or loss of professional livelihood." The court said if Lockyer is successful in his pursuit against the amendment, California will be able to prosecute health care providers that refuse to offer emergency abortion services. Reuters has more.