Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, president of the Vatican's health department, said Sunday that Italian proposals to give legal status to unmarried couples are a threat to traditional families. A "traditional" family is held by the Vatican to be a...

UN leaders at the 60th General Assembly session now underway in New York in the aftermath of the 2005 World Summit are pressing for agreement on a definition of terrorism and are calling for a broad international...

Approximately 900 detainees held in Australian Department of Immigration detention camps have caused themselves injury during the past three years, according to documents obtained by Macquarie University academic Denise Leith under Australia's Freedom of...

Rwandan Foreign Minister Charles Murigande told the UN General Assembly Sunday that Rwanda is dissatisfied with United Nations reforms pushed through at the 2005 World Summit last week. The agreement [PDF...

Iraq constitution final draft (as translated into English), presented to the Iraqi National Assembly September 18, 2005 and delivered to the UN for printing. Read the full text via the Education for Peace in Iraq Center. Reported in JURIST's...

Constitución Política de la República de Chile, enacted September 17, 2005 [heavily-amended version of the 1980 constitution designed to entrench democracy by, inter alia, reducing the presidential term from 6 years to 4 years, giving the president control over the...

Former Illinois Governor George Ryan , who made national headlines and won praise in some quarters in January 2003 when just before leaving office he commuted the executions of all Illinois inmates then on death row [CNN file...

The head of a support group for families of Kuwaiti prisoners held by the US at the Guantanamo Bay military prison has said that American authorities have agreed to release five of the remaining eleven Kuwait prisoners held at...

Afghans voted in their first parliamentary elections in decades Sunday, without the significant violence feared by officials . Anti-government Taliban fighters had agreed not to attack civilian voters, but warned people to stay away from areas...

Widespread hunger strikes at the US military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay are troubling senior US commanders and presenting serious challenges in managing the detainees, the New York Times reported Sunday. As many as 200 detainees...