A Chilean judge on Monday formally charged the youngest son, former secretary, and estate executor of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for maliciously making false or incomplete tax declarations. The charges relate to multi-million dollar accounts discovered in 2004 in the US-based Riggs National Bank . Lawyers for Marco Antonio Pinochet deny the charges. AP [...]

A Myanmar court on Tuesday sentenced fourteen members of the 88 Generation Students pro-democracy group to sixty-five years in prison, according to media reports . The sentencing was revealed by defendants' relatives after allegedly taking place in a court in Yangon's Insein Prison . The Thai website Irawaddy.org has published the names of the convicted [...]

Advisers to US President-elect Barack Obama emphasized Monday in the wake of press reports that Obama has not made a decision regarding the future of the military prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and its prisoners, despite an earlier Associated Press story that Obama strategists had begun working on a plan to hold criminal trials in [...]

UK House of Lords judge Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury has said that when the new UK Supreme Court is constituted in 2009 replacing the current Law Lords, members of the country's Parliament should be able to question the justices because of the court's influence on British laws. Speaking last week at the annual meeting of [...]

The US Department of Defense (DOD) on Monday announced the transfer of two Guantanamo Bay detainees to Algeria. The Department says that approximately 60 detainees at the base are eligible for release, and that it is negotiating with host countries to allow their transfer. It said the transfers were approved after a "comprehensive series of [...]

Taipei police arrested former Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian on Tuesday following questioning by prosecutors about possible corruption and money laundering. Prosecutors are specifically questioning whether Chen, the former leader of the now-opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) who resigned the presidency in May 2008, embezzled money from the state affairs fund. Chen has maintained his innocence [...]

A judge for the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday denied a government motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive seeking access to e-mail records from the White House Office of Administration (OA) under the Freedom of Information [...]

On the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, JURIST Contributing Editor Mary Ellen O'Connell of Notre Dame Law School says that US President-elect Obama should act quickly to bring the United States back into compliance with international law, especially by ending America's unlawful use of force… The First World War ended November [...]

Members of the Chinese delegation to the UN Committee Against Torture (CAT) on Monday said that the Chinese government had provided training and enacted judicial reforms to help implement its prohibitions against torture, illegal detention, and enforced disappearances, but that the committee needed to consider policy differences based on China's size, population, and culture. CAT [...]

Members of the UK parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) are pushing for legislation to limit the ability of the media to report on matters affecting national security, according to an Independent report Monday. Under the current system, news editors may seek guidance from Defence Advisory Notices (DA-Notices) when considering whether to publish information that [...]