The US Supreme Court denied certiorari Monday in the capital cases of Kelly v. California (07-11073) and Zamudio v. California (07-11425) . Petitioners in the cases were seeking new guidelines for "victim impact" evidence presented to juries during sentencing. Petitioners Douglas Kelly and Samuel Zamudio sought to remand the sentencing phases of their murder convictions [...]

A Bangladeshi court on Monday ordered three members of the cabinet of former Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia to jail on corruption charges. Matiur Rahman Nizami, Ali Ahsan Mohammad, and Saifur Rahman, who served as industry, social welfare and finance ministers respectively, allegedly ignored lower bidders when they awarded a Chinese company a contract to [...]

German officials on Sunday arrested an aide to Rwandan President Paul Kagame in connection with the 1994 assassination of then-president Juvenal Habyarima that touched off the infamous Rwanda genocide . Rose Kabuye , an official in the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) , was arrested under a European warrant issued by French Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere in [...]

Advisers to US President-elect Barack Obama have begun working on a plan to hold criminal trials in US courts for a large number of Guantanamo Bay detainees, according to a Monday report by the Associated Press. Under the plan, which would also entail the end of Guantanamo-based military commissions , the majority of detainees would [...]

The Judges Association of Serbia (JAS) has criticized a set of proposed judicial reforms slated for debate in the country's parliament beginning Tuesday. The Serbian Ministry of Justice and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission to Serbia have been working with the judges on the Draft Law on Judges of Serbia [...]

John Podesta , former White House Chief of Staff under President Bill Clinton and now co-chair of the transition team for US president-elect Barack Obama said in an interview on Fox News Sunday over the weekend that Obama is making plans to issue executive orders to reverse some of the more contentious policies implemented during [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Virginia Keyder, currently teaching European Union law at Bogazici University and Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, says that while the European Commission, aided most recently by the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice, has taken steps to encourage and even mandate increased state data retention for more efficient crime-fighting in [...]

JURIST Contributing Editor Michael Kelly of Creighton University School of Law says that not only should the incoming Obama administration close the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, it should close down the stigmatized military base as a whole, coverting it into a joint US-Cuban scientific station to monitor and study climate change… Candidate Obama [...]

UN Peacekeeping Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo (MUNOC) head Alan Doss on Saturday condemned recent killings of civilians by militias in the country as war crimes. Doss made the statement after MUNOC announced that it had received "credible reports" that civilians had been targeted by militia groups the National Congress for the Defense [...]

Thousands of demonstrators in San Diego and Los Angeles on Saturday protested the passage of Proposition 8 , an amendment to the California constitution making same-sex marriages illegal in the state. The proposition, approved by about 52 percent of California voters last week, provides that "nly marriage between a man and a woman is valid [...]