[JURIST] The Moroccan Association for Human Rights (AMDH) [advocacy website, in French] says that a Moroccan detainee held at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST archive] who was supposedly transferred to the government of Morocco [official website] on October 12 is missing, according to his family. Younes Chekkouri was allegedly arrested in Afghanistan [Le Reporter backgrounder, in French] for helping Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar recruit Moroccan supporters. A letter from the family said they knew nothing of his whereabouts and have heard nothing from the government. AMDH has demanded an investigation into the conduct of Morocco's justice, interior and security ministers in the matter. The US Department of Defense stated in a press release [text] on October 12 that it released one Moroccan detainee, but did not give his name.

There were once some 19 Moroccan detainees [WP list] being held at Guantanamo Bay. The US government believes there are only 3 Moroccan detainees remaining in custody but that some Islamic groups believe there are 4. AFP has more.

[JURIST] UK Home Secretary John Reid [BBC profile] is soliciting bids for the provision of prison ships to house approximately 800 inmates to relieve pressure on Britain's overcrowded jails. The system has neared its 80,000 inmate limit [JURIST report] and the country's reconviction rate has reached a record high. Currently, Great Britain has only one prison ship, HMP Weare, but it was closed [BBC report] by Chief Inspector of Prisons Anne Owers in 2005 after being found to be inadequate, cramped, overpriced, and in the wrong location.

Reid's move has inevitably evoked memories of the notorious prison ships maintained by British authorities in North America and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when otherwise abandoned "hulks" were repurposed to house American prisoners of war and convicts awaiting transportation to Australia. During the Revolutionary War, more Americans died on 16 dank, overcrowded, and unsanitary prison ships in New York Harbor [Newsday backgrounder] than in all the war's battles combined. During the Northern Ireland "troubles" of the 1970s, the British also used a prison ship to house Irish nationalists being held without trial.

The prison ships option appears to be only one of several under official consideration, however. Other possibilities include increasing the speed at which some foreign prisoners are deported and moving other inmates to open jails. Reuters has more.

[JURIST] US Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) [official website] has urged the US Justice Department [letter] to appeal this week's federal court ruling vacating the conviction [opinion, PDF; JURIST report] of former Enron Chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay [JURIST news archive]. Feinstein wrote to US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales Friday, calling the ruling "disconcerting" and warranting "immediate attention." US District Court Judge Sim Lake Tuesday vacated Lay's conviction and dismissed the indictment against him under the doctrine of abatement, which allows federal courts to vacate convictions of criminal defendants that die pending appeal. Lay died suddenly [JURIST report] of a heart attack in July, two months after being convicted [JURIST report] on fraud and conspiracy charges [indictment, PDF] for providing investors with false and misleading financial information from 1999 up until Enron filed bankruptcy in late 2001.

Lake cited US v. Estate of Parsons [opinion, PDF], where the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that a defendant's death during a pending appeal nullified the guilty verdict because the defendant could not properly challenge the conviction. In her letter to Gonzales Friday, Feinstein wrote:

The Fifth Circuit holding in Parsons went far beyond traditional notions of abatement. While the common-law doctrine of abatement has historically wiped out "punishments" following a criminal defendant's death, the Supreme Court has never held that it also must wipe out a victim’s right to "compensatory" relief such as restitution. As the six dissenters in Parsons noted, the majority's "'finality rationale' is a completely novel judicial creation which has not been embraced or even suggested by ... other courts." And the Third and Fourth Circuits have expressly refused to abate a restitution order after a criminal defendant's death.

...dismayed to learn that the Justice Department delivered its request for emergency legislation on this issue only to Vice President Cheney and Speaker Hastert, failing to notify all members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees...

I also plan to introduce legislation when Congress returns from recess to address the issue of abatement after a criminal defendant's death. We should do everything in our power to protect not only the victims of Enron, but also other victims who may be harmed by this unfair principle of law.

ALSO ON JURIST  Topic: Enron | Op-ed: No Redemption Now: Thoughts on the Death of Ken Lay

[JURIST] International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) [official website; JURIST news archive] prosecutor Carla del Ponte [official profile] said Saturday that she believes that Bosnian war fugitive Ratko Mladic [ICTY backgrounder; JURIST news archive] "is in Serbia, in and around Belgrade". Del Ponte has been critical of Serbian efforts to catch Mladic, calling the failure to apprehend him "inexcusable"" [JURIST report] and urging the EU to hold off on membership talks with Serbia [JURIST report] largely for that reason. Del Ponte's statement comes shortly after proceedings started in the trial of eight former Serb policemen charged with hiding Mladic [JURIST report]. Several Serbian government ministers have resigned over the government's inability to bring the former military leader to justice.

Serbian President Boris Tadic [official website; BBC profile] insists, however, that he has "no information" on Mladic's location and that "there is a problem for our security services to locate all suspects, including Mladic." Mladic, the former head of the Bosnian Serb army, is wanted on war crimes charges in connection with the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Muslims during the siege of Srebrenica [BBC report; JURIST news archive]. AFP has more.

[JURIST] Repeated allegations of widespread human rights abuses in Myanmar [JURIST news archive] continue to go uninvestigated by the military government and its inaction remains the primary obstacle to securing human rights in the country, according to a new UN report [UN press release] presented Friday. UN Special rapportuer for human rights in Myanmar [rapporteur reports archive] Paulo Sergio Pinheiro [UNHCHR profile] told the UN General Assembly's Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural) [official website] that summary executions, torture, and recruitment of child soldiers must be addressed by the government immediately to protect victims and give them effective remedies. Pinheiro observed that recent increases in military operations have forced thousands of ethnics to flee their homes [Asia Times report], escalating into what could soon become a humanitarian crisis. The Myanmar government has blocked Pinheiro from visiting the country since 2003, but the UN official says he obtained report data from reliable sources.

The southeast Asian nation, formerly called Burma [CIA backgrounder], has been controlled by a military junta since 1988, when a democracy movement led by opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi [Nobel profile] was crushed. Suu Kyi has been under house arrest [JURIST report] since 1989. Since the junta took power, several attempts to draft a new constitution have broken down [JURIST report], although constitutional talks started again [JURIST report] earlier this month. AP has more.

[JURIST] US Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried [official profile] Friday condemned the passage of a bill [text, in French; JURIST news archive] last week by the French lower house of parliament making it a crime to deny that killings of Armenians in 1915 [ANI backgrounder] in the then-Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) was genocide. Fried said the bill, which still needs approval by the French Senate and President Jacques Chirac to become law, hampers EU relations with Turkey and “doesn’t seem to make any sense. Every nation . . . has things in its past of which it is not proud.” AP has more.

In the wake of the legislation, relations between France and Turkey have become strained, notwithstanding an apology from Chirac [JURIST report] to the Turkish prime minister, and have sparked a Turkish boycott of French goods and television programs [JURIST report] and talk of retaliatory litigation [JURIST report] in the European Court of Human Rights. Turkish lawmakers have meanwhile threatened to pass a matching bill [JURIST report] labeling as genocide colonial killings of Algerians by the French and making it illegal to deny French culpability. Turkey, which is currently trying to join the European Union, denies [JURIST comment] that the killing of 1.5 million Armenians during World War I was in fact genocide.

[JURIST] Rogelio Pfirter [official profile], director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) [official website] has urged [press release] North Korea and several Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, Israel, Lebanon and Syria, to join the Chemical Weapons Convention [materials] and destroy their weapon stockpiles. Speaking to the UN General Assembly Friday, Pfirter said that all nations must join the convention, otherwise a "major loophole" is created that undermines efforts to contain deadly weapons. So far 180 nations [OPCW list] have signed on to the convention since it was created in 1997. Under the convention, banned weapons, including nerve and mustard gases, must be destroyed by June 2007, though countries may apply for a five year extension. Another six countries [OPCW list], Israel among them, have signed the convention but have not yet ratified, leaving nine countries [OPCW list] that have not signed. These include the nations Pfirter named as a "hard core" of countries resisting the convention, as well as Angola, Barbados, Iraq, Montenegro and Somalia.

This refusal follows the October 14 imposition of sanctions on North Korea [JURIST report] by the UN Security Council in response to the country's nuclear testing. Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon have pointed to regional conflicts as the source of their reluctance to ratify or join the convention, despite in the Middle East and other war zones. Reuters has more. The UN News Service has additional coverage.

[JURIST] The Intermediate People's Court [judicial system backgrounder] in the city of Shaoyang has released a Chinese journalist, Yang Xiaoqing, on bail after he served only seven months of his one-year sentence [JURIST report], Yang's wife said Saturday. The court exempted Yang from serving the remainder of his sentence, but did not overturn his conviction. Yang was arrested in January on charges of using news reports exposing local corruption to extort $100,000 and was convicted in June. Yang wrote for the Hong Kong Commerce Daily [media website] about local corruption in the privatization of a state-owned company. The court said that it left Yang's guilty verdict stand because local officials were concerned that Yang would bring a lawsuit against the government.

Recent exercises of Chinese state power over journalists include the cases of Yang Tianshui [JURIST report] and Li Yuanlong [JURIST report]. Both journalists were sentenced to terms of imprisonment for subverting state authority. A New York Times researcher, Zhao Yan, was also charged this year with leaking state secrets for revealing the resignation of Jiang Zemin as head of the military before it was formally announced by the government. Zhao was convicted [JURIST report] of fraud, but the state secrets charges were eventually dropped. AP has more.

[JURIST] The US Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Friday that Arizona can enforce a new law [PDF] requiring voters to show government-issued ID cards [JURIST news archive] at the polls for the November elections, reversing a decision [text, PDF; JURIST report] rendered earlier this month by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit [official website]. In a per curiam opinion, the court said:

The election procedures implemented . . . do not necessarily result in the turning away of qualified, registered voters by election officials for lack of proper identification. A voter who arrives at the polls on election day without identification may cast a conditional provisional ballot [and] is allowed five business days to return . . . and present proper identification.

[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia [official website] has ruled that the National Indian Gaming Commission (NIGC) [official website], does not have authority to regulate how certain games, including blackjack and slot machines, are run on Indian casinos. The dispute arose in 2001, when the NIGC attempted to audit an Arizona casino run by the Colorado River Indian Tribes [official website] in order to force it to comply with federal regulations. In his opinion [PDF text] Friday, Judge A. Raymond Randolph [official profile] affirmed a lower court ruling and found that there was no statutory basis to authorize the NIGC to regulate blackjack and slot machine operations as "Class III" games.

The NIGC does have authority, however, to regulate games such as lotto and bingo run by the tribes, but Class III games generate the most revenue. AP has more.

[JURIST] US District Judge Lewis Babcock upheld Colorado's ban on smoking in indoor public places Friday, despite allegations that it discriminates in favor of casinos at the expense of bar owners. Babcock dismissed a suit challenging the constitutionality of the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act [PDF], which since July 1 has banned smoking indoors in public, with the exception [SmokeFreeColorado backgrounder] of casinos and a few other specified locations. The suit was brought by the Denver-based Coalition for Equal Rights [group website], which in June sought an injunction [press release] against the act.

In dismissing the lawsuit, Babcock noted that the legislation is not rendered unconstitutional [Denver Post report] simply because casinos will not face the same hardships as bar owners, pointing to casinos' "unique constitutional and statutory status in Colorado." Attorneys for the plaintiffs have not decided if they will appeal. AP has more.

[JURIST] US Marine Pfc. John J. Jodka will plead guilty in connection with the April 26 death of Iraqi civilian Hashim Ibrahim Awad [Wikipedia profile] in Hamdania [USMC timeline; JURIST news archive], according to Jodka's lawyer speaking Friday. The guilty plea, expected to be entered on Thursday, is to charges of assault and obstruction of justice, reduced from the original charges of murder and kidnapping [JURIST report]. The deal follows the October 6 guilty plea [JURIST report] of US Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Melson J. Bacos to kidnapping and conspiracy in the same incident; Bacos was sentenced to a one year imprisonment. AP has more.

A total of eight US military personnel were initially charged [JURIST report] in connection with the Hamdania killing, in which they are said to have shot Awad and then made it seem that he was an insurgent planting a roadside bomb by placing a shovel and rifle next to his dead body. Jodka is the lowest-ranked of the five military personnel directly charged with the shooting and was 19 at the time of the incident. In August, military prosecutors said they would not seek the death penalty [JURIST report] against Jodka.