An Iraqi general and three senior officers have been arrested on accusations of corruption, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Salam al-Zawba'i told Reuters Wednesday. Although the reported arrest has not been confirmed by the US military or the Iraqi Defense Ministry, al-Zawba'i said Major General Abdul Jalil Khalaf Shuweil, in charge of troops in Kadhimiya, a [...]
A federal judge in New Orleans Wednesday rejected a bid to have all federal lawsuits against Merck & Co. brought in connection with the withdrawn painkiller Vioxx consolidated in a single national class action against the company. US District Judge Eldon Fallon , who is responsible for co-ordinating pre-trial procedures in the federal cases, said [...]
Rwandan President Paul Kagame Wednesday derided the recommendation of French anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere that he stand trial for the 1994 killing of former president Juvenal Habyarimana as "bullying and arrogant." Kagame has denied involvement in shooting down the plane that carried Habyarimana, leading to the former president's death, which in turn sparked the country's [...]
An Italian judge Wednesday refused the request of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to have one of the judges removed from presiding over his tax fraud trial. Berlusconi and co-defendant David Mills had asked Judge Edoardo d'Avossa to remove himself from the current trial, citing d'Avossa's involvement with other Berlusconi trials, including the "Medusa" [...]
A coalition of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit in Florida Tuesday claiming that officials in Sarasota County failed to investigate or report various alleged malfunctions with the touch-screen voting machines and are calling for a re-vote in Florida's hotly-contested 13th Congressional District. People for the American Way, Voter Action, the ACLU of Florida and the [...]
Torture and ill-treatment in Russia is regularly used to extract confessions from suspects , according to a report released Wednesday by Amnesty International . Noting that Russia was in violation of its national and international obligations, the human rights group found that Russian police regularly engage in the mistreatment of suspects and that "lawyers are [...]
The US Justice Department has withdrawn its notice of appeal of a federal judge's decision to vacate the conviction of former Enron founder Ken Lay . Lay, convicted in May of fraud and conspiracy charges for providing investors with false and misleading financial information from 1999 up until Enron filed bankruptcy in late 2001, died [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Richard Edwards, Principal Lecturer in Law at the University of the West of England in Bristol, UK, says that the ongoing 'Cash for Honours' investigation into whether benefactors of Britain's ruling Labour Party made loans or donations in order to secure peerages points up the problematic position of the British Attorney General [...]
JURIST Guest Columnist Carl Tobias of the University of Richmond School of Law says that while the US federal judiciary has much to be thankful on this Thanksgiving, it and the nation will be even better off if Democrats and Republicans end their partisan wrangling and work together on key matters of judicial policy… There [...]
Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Lebanon, UN Human Rights Council, November 10, 2006; released November 21, 2006 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.