Thousands of Romanian prisoners protested Sunday demanding improved conditions in overcrowded prisons after a bill was rejected last week by a committee of the Romanian Parliament . The bill would have granted early release to approximately 10,000 prisoners with less than five-year sentences. Nearly 6,000 inmates in 24 prisons across Romania refused food, set fire [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Chandra Lekha Sriram, Chair of Human Rights at the University of East London School of Law (UK), says that while the legal pursuit of late Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet in recent years represented a step forward for human rights law, his death without facing trial reflects its continuing limitations… Augusto Pinochet [...]

Chileans reacted to the death of former dictator General Augusto Pinochet in divergent ways Sunday, with some protesting that he died without ever facing trial for human rights violations committed during his regime, others celebrating the news of his death with champagne, and still others some mourning and praising Pinochet for saving the country from [...]

The US Department of Defense (DOD) has indicated that it will seek congressional approval for its planned $100 million Guantanamo Bay legal facility rather than expedite construction by declaring it an emergency expense. US Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England, in a November letter to Senate Armed Forces Committee Chairman John Warner, had proposed to [...]

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani slammed the Baker Iraq Study Group report during a Sunday news interview, says it contained "some very dangerous articles which undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and the constitution." Talabani objected to a proposal to place a US advisor in each unit of the Iraqi army, and targeted another urging adoption of [...]

Wire services are reporting that former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet has died, according to an announcement from a military hospital in Santiago. Pinochet, 91, suffered a major heart attack last Sunday; he was stabilized after emergency surgery but later was moved back into intensive care. Reuters has more. In recent years Chilean authorities have [...]

The Federal Communications Commission is set to vote on the proposed $82.2 billion AT&T -BellSouth merger after FCC general counsel Samuel Feder authorized Commissioner Robert McDowell to vote on a merger despite a possible conflict of interest. In an 8-page memorandum issued late last week, Feder found it important that only McDowell may break the [...]

Outgoing UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for greater efforts to protect human rights worldwide in a speech marking International Human Rights Day . Annan on Friday acknowledged that the UN has often failed to live up to its own responsibility in the area, and expressed disappointment that his hope of establishing human rights as [...]

The Russian State Duma has effectively extended a national moratorium on the death penalty until 2010 by postponing until then the establishment of jury trials in Chechnya , the only territory in Russia that still uses three-judge panels in criminal hearings. The Russian Constitutional Court ruled in 1999 that the death penalty cannot be enforced [...]

Legislation extending the mandate of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) passed both houses of the US Congress last week at the end of its current session, and the agency will continue to monitor US spending in Iraq until the fall of 2008 pending President Bush's signature. SIGIR was originally established to independently [...]