Serkan Yolcu : “On Wednesday July 7, 2010, the Turkish media was unexpectedly informed by the press office of Constitutional Court that the Court made its eagerly anticipated judgment on the constitutional amendment package that has been on the agenda for months. After 9.5 hours of debate in only one day, the eleven members of [...]

Former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz and 15 other high ranking former officials in the government of Saddam Hussein appeared in court over the weekend and were charged with crimes committed during Hussein’s regime. According to his lawyer, Aziz will now stand trial on charges of squandering public funds . Aziz’s lawyer contends that he [...]

The government of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate announced Monday that the two Guantanamo Bay detainees accepted by Germany earlier this month would be confined for at least a year while undergoing psychological treatment and integration training. The German government agreed to take the detainees after negotiations with the Obama administration. Rhineland-Palatinate Interior Minister Karl [...]

The US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) has announced that insurance plans being offered as part of a new federally-funded program providing insurance to persons denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions will only cover abortions in cases of rape or incest, or where the life of the mother is in danger. The announcement. [...]

A US military lawyer for Canadian Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr announced Saturday that he will vigorously defend Khadr at his US military commission trial scheduled to begin next month . Khadr fired his US civilian lawyers earlier this month and requested that his US military lawyer be fired as well. Judge Patrick Parrish denied [...]

UK Immigration Minister Damian Green indicated in an interview Sunday that Britain’s coalition government would not seek or support a British law banning the wearing of the Islamic burqa or other face coverings in public. Green stated that banning the burqa would not be consistent with British society , where mutual respect for differences among [...]

The US Supreme Court on Friday declined to review the decision of a lower court permitting the government to transfer Guantanamo Bay detainee Farhi Saeed bin Mohammed to Algeria. The 5-3 decision leaves in place a ruling of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia , in which the government asserted that [...]

A panel of EU judges on Friday declined a request from US officials to extradite Kosovo terror suspect Bajram Asllani. Nicholas Hawton, a spokesperson for the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX) , stated that the panel ruled that the presented evidence of Asllani’s involvement was insufficient and that the countries lack a [...]

A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday ordered the State Department to reconsider the status of the People’s Mujahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI) . The PMOI has been designated a foreign terrorist group by the US since 1997, but it argues that it stopped military [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Erlinder, defense counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and Professor of Law at William Mitchell College of Law, and his colleagues Beth Lyons and John Philpot of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) Association des Avocats de la Defense (ADAD) say that in the wake of the recent [...]