[JURIST] Judge Fausto Pocar [official profile], President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) [official website], called Monday for the arrest of Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic [ICTY materials, PDF; amended indictment, PDF] and Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic [ICTY materials, PDF; indictment, PDF]. Mladic and Hadzic are the two remaining major fugitives wanted for ICTY prosecution on war crimes charges stemming from their roles as Serbian leaders during the Yugoslavian ethnic conflicts of the 1990s. Both have been in hiding since the end of the conflicts. Pocar's remarks came during a speech to the UN General Assembly [official website] In the speech [text], he said:

Let me now turn to the second point for which Member State support is essential: the arrest of the remaining fugitives. As you well know, positive developments have taken place during the reporting period. The arrests of Stojan Župljanin and Radovan Karadži? were particularly important milestones, and we commend the Government of Serbia for the critical cooperation it provided in this respect. However, we cannot successfully accomplish our work if the last two remaining fugitives, Ratko Mladi? and Goran Hadži?, are not arrested immediately. I must once again emphasize that while the Tribunal has done its utmost to expeditiously conduct and complete its cases, the late arrests of fugitives, for which the international community must take responsibility, will inevitably lead to slippages in the scheduled end of our proceedings. Thus, while we are ensuring that the trials of the four recently arrested accused will all start in 2009, the arrests of the remaining fugitives might oblige us to push even further our target dates for the completion of all trials.

I shall also reiterate that the obligation of all member States of the United Nations to cooperate with the Tribunal pursuant to Article 29 of the Statute are not limited to the arrest of fugitives. This obligation is in fact much wider and also entails the provision of assistance in all aspects of ongoing proceedings before the Tribunal, including access to archives, the production of documents, and access to and protection of witnesses. I must note in this respect preoccupying incidents of witness interference which have occurred during the reporting period, as well as delays in the service of documents, which have affected the expeditious conduct of our proceedings. Finally, State cooperation also entails cooperation in the relocation of witnesses and the enforcement of the Tribunal's sentences. While the Registry has managed to finalize seven agreements on enforcement of sentences, further support from States is required with respect to relocation of witnesses.

[JURIST] The UK House of Lords on Monday rejected a proposal supported by Prime Minister Gordon Brown [official websites] to increase the amount of time authorities may detain terrorism suspects without charge. The upper house of Parliament voted 309-118 to amend an anti-terrorism bill [materials; BBC Q/A] by eliminating a highly contentious provision that would have increased the maximum period for holding uncharged suspects from 28 days to 42. Among the Lords arguing against the extension was former Attorney General Peter Goldsmith [official profile], who had written [Guardian op-ed] that the proposal is "wrong in principle and dangerous in practice." Bloomberg News has more. The Times has local coverage.

In June, the House of Commons narrowly approved the 42-day detention provision after it was amended [JURIST reports] to apply only in "grave and exceptional" cases of terrorist threats. Brown and other proponents of the extension have argued [Times op-ed] it is necessary to protect national security. Then-UK Home Secretary John Reid called for longer pre-charge time limits last year, and current Home Secretary Jacqui Smith proposed the 42-day detention period [JURIST reports] in December. The 28-day period was instituted in 2005 after the Commons defeated a proposal [JURIST report] by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair's government to increase the period to 90 days.

[JURIST] Justice ministers of countries belonging to the League of Arab States [official website, in Arabic; BBC profile] said Monday that the International Criminal Court has 'no sound legal basis' to issue an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir [BBC profile; JURIST news archive]. At a day-long summit in Cairo, the ministers suggested that ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo's July application for a warrant to arrest al-Bashir [JURIST report] was politically motivated and denounced [Sudan Tribune coverage] what they described as "attempts to politicize the principles of international justice." They applauded recent steps Sudan has taken to prosecute war crimes perpetrators, such as appointing Sudanese prosecutors to investigate and try suspects and the creation of internationally monitored courts [JURIST reports]. BBC News has more; the International Herald Tribune has additional coverage.

Immediately after Moreno-Ocampo applied for an arrest warrant in July, the Arab League rebuked the prosecutor [JURIST report] for his “unbalanced stance” and said that an indictment – the first ever against a sitting head of state – would set a dangerous and destabilizing precedent. Last month, then-South African President Thabo Mbeki spoke out against any ICC arrest of Bashir [JURIST report], telling reporters that the move will jeopardize stability in the Darfur region [JURIST news archive]. Moreno-Campo traveled to New York last month to seek support for the arrest of Bashir despite the fact that Bashir has threatened to ignore [JURIST reports] any ICC-issued arrest warrant, saying he would not "deal with or respond to" the ICC.

[JURIST] The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal [official website] has dismissed [decision, PDF] a complaint alleging that the Canadian newsmagazine Maclean's [media website] incited hatred toward Muslims. The commission ruled Friday that a 2006 article [text] by conservative writer Mark Steyn [personal website] entitled "The future belongs to Islam" did not violate a provision [text] of the British Columbia Human Rights Code that prohibits publication of material "likely to expose a person or a group or class of persons to hatred or contempt." While noting that the complaint brought by members of the Canadian Islamic Congress [advocacy website] "raises issues of importance to all Canadians," the commission found that the article's content did not "rise[] to the level of hatred and contempt." In its decision, a commission panel wrote:

[W]e have determined that, considered in its context, and on the evidence before us, the complainants have not met their burden of demonstrating that the Article rises to the level of detestation, calumny and vilification necessary to breach s. 7(1)(b) of the Code....

The Article may attempt to rally public opinion by exaggeration and causing the reader to fear Muslims, but fear is not synonymous with hatred and contempt.

We accept that it may be possible to link feelings of fear with hatred and contempt but in the absence of any expert evidence which makes that link in the context of the Article, we cannot find that it was done so in this case.

The Article, with all its inaccuracies and hyperbole, has resulted in political debate which, in our view, s. 7(1)(b) was never intended to suppress. In fact, as the evidence in this case amply demonstrates, the debate has not been suppressed and the concerns about the impact of hate speech silencing a minority have not been borne out.

[JURIST] The European Union [official website] Monday temporarily suspended its travel ban on Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko [official website; BBC profile] and several other Belarussian officials following the first high-level talks between Belarus and the EU in four years. A meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg [backgrounder] directed the ban be lifted in an attempt to encourage democratic reform and the improvement of human rights. Travel restrictions remain in place on four Belarussian officials who were allegedly involved in the disappearance of four opposition leaders in 2000. Recognizing that Belarus recently released jailed opposition leader Alexander Kozulin [JURIST report] and other political prisoners, an EU spokesperson was quoted [BBC report] by the BBC as saying 'We want to show that progress is being rewarded.' Reuters has more; EUobserver has additional coverage.

Lukashenko has recently sought to improve his country's ties with western nations, but EU-imposed sanctions have remained pending the release of all political prisoners, including Kozulin. While it lifted the travel ban for six months, the EU maintained asset freezes on top Belarussian officials. The US imposed its own travel ban on Lukashenko [JURIST report] in May 2006. The US State Department severely criticized Belarus' human rights record [JURIST report] in March in its annual human rights country reports.

[JURIST] Human Rights Watch (HRW) Monday encouraged the Ethiopian parliament to reject the draft Charities and Societies Proclamation [text, in Amharic], which HRW officials concluded in a report [text, PDF; press release] would severely undermine human rights efforts in the country if passed. The draft law, which is a revision of the law proposed earlier this year [text, PDF; JURIST report], is designed to regulate civil society organizations (CSOs) in the country. HRW claims that it will instead harm human rights by creating a Charities and Societies Agency with broad authority to interfere in CSO internal workings and to ban any CSO that fails to meet government specifications. According to the report:

[T]he intended and actual result of this law would be to make it nearly impossible for any civil society organization to carry out work the government does not approve of. It also contravenes fundamental human rights guaranteed by international law and by Ethiopia’s constitution. Most notably, the law would criminalize human rights-related work carried out by non-Ethiopian organizations while at the same time making it impossible for domestic human rights organizations to operate with any real degree of effectiveness or independence. ...

The current version of the bill remains a blunt tool whose primary impact would be to destroy the already-limited ability of Ethiopian civil society actors to criticize or act independently of the government. It would also result in the de facto criminalization of any and all independent human rights work that seeks to document or challenge the Ethiopian government’s appalling human rights record.

[JURIST] The European Court of Justice (ECJ) [official website] has broadly interpreted [judgment; ECJ materials] rules protecting the content of databases from copying, regardless of how the information is extracted from its source. The court was considering a lawsuit filed by the University of Freiburg (UF) [university website] against Direct Media Publishing (DMP) [official website, in German] for selling data CDs with a list of poems virtually identical to one created by the university. UF had argued that, because of its significant investment in the compilation of the list, its contents was protected under Article 7 of Directive 96/9 of the European Parliament [text]. DMP had argued that even if it had used the information, doing so was not prohibited by the Directive because the data could have been referenced and reproduced rather than digitally copied. The court held Friday that the means of copying the information was immaterial, and that instead the test was whether or not the content had been substantially reproduced:

The transfer of material from a protected database to another database following an on?screen consultation of the first database and an individual assessment of the material contained in that first database is capable of constituting an ‘extraction’, within the meaning of Article 7 of Directive 96/9 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 March 1996 on the legal protection of databases, to the extent that – which it is for the referring court to ascertain – that operation amounts to the transfer of a substantial part, evaluated qualitatively or quantitatively, of the contents of the protected database, or to transfers of insubstantial parts which, by their repeated or systematic nature, would have resulted in the reconstruction of a substantial part of those contents.

[JURIST] The US Department of Defense (DOD) released a ruling [text, PDF] Sunday indicating that Guantanamo detainees who represent themselves at trial are not entitled to Internet access and some computer hardware and software to aid in their defense. Military judge Col. Ralph Kohlmann [JURIST news archive] wrote that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [BBC profile; JURIST news archive] and four other detainees charged [DOD materials] with planning the Sept. 11 attacks already had access to writing materials, laptops with word-processing and discovery software, and copies of some military commissions regulations, but also wrote that officials warned the detainees that self-representation could limit the materials available to them:

[T]he simple reality of the situation is that there are limits on what the Government must provide to the accused under an umbrella of reasonable access to materials for the preparation of the defense. Reasonable access does not equate to a right or an entitlement to be placed on the same footing as a technologically state of the art law office.

[JURIST] The Communist Party of China (CPC) [official website; CFR backgrounder] Central Committee on Sunday approved measures [Xinhua release] that would liberalize the country's land use laws in an effort decrease rural poverty and increase the country's agricultural capacity. Under China's constitution [text], the country's land is either owned collectively or by the state, but the reforms would give farmers broader autonomy to sell or borrow against their land use rights and establish a financial infrastructure to allow for larger, more efficient farms [China Daily report]. The changes were approved by the party during a plenary session during which the CPC announced plans [Xinhua report] to "eliminate" rural poverty by the year 2020. The Central Committee also solicited input from leaders outside of the CPC [Xinhua report] during the session, a move unusual for country's one-party government. The reforms are expected to be considered by China's National People's Congress [official website] in March. AFP has more.

The Chinese government has recently taken other steps towards a more democratic, capitalist structure, but has continued to face international criticism for alleged rights abuses. In September, the State Council of China [official website, in English] issued regulations [JURIST report] implementing ambiguous provisions of the Labor Contract Law [backgrounder] which was viewed as a major advancement [Bloomberg report] for employee rights. Earlier that month, however, Human Rights in China (HRIC) [advocacy website] issued a release [text; JURIST report] saying that Chinese police and other officials still employ torture [JURIST news archive] to elicit confessions and intimidate political dissidents despite domestic and international bans, and a July report [PDF text; JURIST report] released by Amnesty International (AI) [advocacy website] said the country had failed significantly improve its human rights record.