[JURIST] Sudan has asked the Arab League [official website, in Arabic] to convene emergency crisis talks concerning a possible International Criminal Court (ICC) [official website; JURIST news archive] arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir [BBC profile]. The Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa [offical profile] has agreed to hold the requested meeting, although no time or date has been set. ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo [official profile] is expected to seek the warrant Monday [JURIST report], based on human rights crimes that Bashir allegedly committed in the Sudanese region of Darfur [JURIST news archive]. News of the proposed warrant was first announced by US State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack, who confirmed the Monday hearings during a press briefing on Friday. Reuters has more. AFP has additional coverage.

Sudanese officials, including Foreign Affairs Minister Al-Samani al-Waila and Ambassador to the UN Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamed, responded angrily [AP report] to news of the arrest warrant. An indictment would mark the first-ever ICC effort to charge a sitting head of state with crimes against humanity and genocide. The Sudanese government has already rejected the ICC's jurisdiction and refuses to surrender two previously-named war crimes suspects [JURIST report]. Hundreds of thousands of people have allegedly been killed in Darfur by Sudanese military and janjaweed [Slate backgrounder] militia forces. An ongoing probe said to involve more than 100 witnesses in 18 countries led Moreno-Ocampo to state before the UN Security Council [official website] in June that “evidence shows that the commission of such crimes on such a scale, over a period of five years, and throughout Darfur, has required the sustained mobilization of the entire Sudanese state apparatus.”

[JURIST] China executed two members of the Chinese Uighur Muslim [JURIST news archive] ethnic minority last week, according to a report from US-funded Radio Free Asia (RFA) [media website]. According to the report [RFA report], the two Uighurs, Mukhtar Setiwalki and Abduweli Imin, were executed after a public announcement of their death sentences on July 9 in China's Xinjiang region. Two other Uighurs were given suspended death sentences, and another thirteen were given jail terms ranging from ten years to life imprisonment. The seventeen Uighurs were alleged to be members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) [GlobalSecurity backgrounder], a militant group calling for separation from China, and which was designated as a terrorist group by the US government in 2002 for alleged links to al-Qaeda. The US has refused to release a number of Uighur detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] because of fears that they would be executed after their repatriation to China. AP has more. AFP has additional coverage.

One of the Uighurs detained by the US, Huzaifa Parhat [JURIST news archive], was designated an enemy combatant by a US Combatant Status Review Tribunal [DOD materials] and later challenged his detention in federal court. In June, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ordered the US government to release Parhat [JURIST report], ruling that he had been improperly designated as an enemy combatant. In 2006, five Chinese Uighur detainees were released to Albania [JURIST report], where officials reviewed applications for asylum. The transfer, which was criticized by China, ended a court challenge against the detainees' indefinite detention [JURIST reports]. In December 2006, lawyers for seven Uighur detainees filed a lawsuit [JURIST report], arguing that the process by which they were determined to be enemy combatants was flawed.

[JURIST] Russian President Dmitry Medvedev [official profile; JURIST news archive] on Saturday told members of the Russian lower house of parliament, the State Duma [official website, in Russian], that he will sign newly-prepared anti-corruption legislation in the near future. Medvedev, speaking at the start of a meeting with party leaders from the Duma, stated [speech, text] that his administration has "very important work to do to improve legislation aimed at fighting against corruption." Medvedev indicated that the proposed legislation is close to completion, and that he "will be signing it in the very near future." RIA Novosti has more.

Medvedev's remarks came after signing a measure [JURIST report] in May establishing an anti-corruption council to be headed by Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin [profile, in Russian]. Medvedev said that a comprehensive national anti-corruption program was necessary to tackle social and economic graft and also to eliminate a prevailing culture of corruption. Medvedev had previously pledged to clean up corruption in his inauguration speech [JURIST report].