The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Thursday said the recent acquittal of Bosnian Muslim war crimes suspect Naser Oric by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) shows that the court is politically biased, and it should be closed before the expiration of its mandate in 2010 . Oric was convicted of war crimes [...]

Officials for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Wednesday that they will revise the Principles of Federal Prosecution of Business Organizations to no longer induce waivers of the attorney-client privilege and to limit what sensitive information investigators may gather. The announcement was part of a DOJ oversight hearing by the Senate Committee on the [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday ordered a federal court to hold an evidentiary hearing to consider whether a man sentenced to death for murder might be mentally retarded. After Michael Wayne Hall was convicted of the 1998 killing of a 19-year-old woman, he claimed at state habeas proceedings that [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit Wednesday affirmed the conviction of a Pakistani man tried for conspiring to bomb a New York City subway station. On appeal, Shahawar Matin Siraj (Matin) argued that the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure required police to produce reports memorializing oral statements that he made to an [...]

German border police arrested  Rwandan war crimes suspect Callixte Mbarushiman on Wednesday as he was preparing to travel to Russia. Mbarushimana, a Hutu, was an employee of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in Rwanda during the the country's 1994 genocide , and was arrested in Frankfurt after Interpol issued an alert . He is suspected by [...]

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) Monday filed bar complaints against two former US Department of Justice (DOJ) officials, alleging that Michael J. Elston and Esther Slater McDonald improperly considered applicants' political affiliations when reviewing applications for DOJ jobs and summer internships. Both McDonald and Elston were named in a June report released by the [...]

Two Swiss nationalist parties gathered enough signatures on their initiative against the construction of minarets to force a national referendum on whether the country's constitution should be amended to ban the structures, the Swiss government announced Tuesday. Officials for the right-wing Swiss People's Party (UDC) and the Federal Democratic Union (UDF) introduced the initiative in [...]

Thailand's opposition Democrat party Wednesday announced it would launch an impeachment bid against Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej after a series of court decisions against key officials in the government and Samak's People Power Party (PPP). On Wednesday, the Thai Constitutional Court dismissed Thai Public Health Minister Chaiya Sasomsup from office after finding he had [...]

A former Chinese anti-corruption prosecutor was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for torturing to death a government official in May 2007. Xiong Zhengliang was convicted of killing Liang Jiping, a deputy director of a government electricity utility, while Liang was in custody for allegedly accepting bribes. Xiong and two deputies beat and deprived Liang of [...]

A pair of Bosnian Serb cousins went to trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) Wednesday on charges of murder, extermination and torture. Milan Lukic and Sredoje Lukic are accused of crimes against humanity related to their actions as part of a paramilitary unit during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war, including several [...]