Sweden’s international prosecutor Magnus Elving unveiled war crimes charges Tuesday against Swedish citizen and former Bosnian prison guard Ahmet Makitan. Makitan is accused of violating the Geneva Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War by kidnapping people and torturing and insulting prisoners at a camp in Dretelj, Bosnia-Herzegovina, during the Balkan War . Twenty-one [...]

A panel of Dutch judges on Tuesday rejected claims of judicial bias, ordering the trial of politician Geert Wilders on charges of making anti-Islamic statements to resume. The panel considered the accusation , but found that language used by Amsterdam District Court Judge Jan Moors on Monday was unobjectionable . Moors had said that Wilders [...]

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in NASA v. Nelson on informational privacy. The issue is whether the government violates a federal contract employee’s constitutional right to informational privacy when it asks in the course of a background investigation whether the employee has received counseling or treatment for illegal drug use or when [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Tuesday sentenced Pakistani-born US citizen Faisal Shahzad to life in prison for attempting to detonate a car bomb in New York City’s Times Square in May. Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum found that Shahzad did not show any remorse for the [...]

A dispute among the Pakistani judiciary worsened on Monday as more than 1,300 civil judges resigned in protest over the treatment of judges by lawyers and to express solidarity with Lahore District and Sessions Judge Zawar A Sheikh. The resignations come amid nationwide demonstrations by lawyers protesting police treatment of lawyers when members of the [...]

The Bangkok Criminal Court on Tuesday dismissed money laundering and fraud charges against suspected Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout , paving the way for his extradition to the US. The court found that there was insufficient evidence , in addition to other technicalities, to prosecute Bout. The charges were filed by US prosecutors in February [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday announced the filing of a civil antitrust lawsuit against credit card companies Visa, MasterCard and American Express . The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York , challenges rules utilized by the companies that prevent merchants from providing discounts and [...]

Robyn Monaco, Rutgers Newark School of Law ’11 and Political Science Masters Candidate ’12, writes about her experience with Maritime Writs of Attachment in the New York banking industry and the veritable blizzard of filings brought on by a single court decision… Frequently with international overseas transactions, banks that are not in the same consortium [...]

The Paris Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced “rogue trader” Jerome Kerviel to three years in prison and an additional two years suspended for fraudulent covert trading while working for French bank Societe Generale . The court convicted Kerviel of breach of trust, forgery and computer hacking and, in addition to his jail sentence, ordered him [...]

The US Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari in Wilner v. NSA , in which lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainees were seeking disclosure of whether conversations with their clients were wiretapped by the National Security Agency (NSA) . The detainees’ lawyers appealed a decision by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit holding [...]