A committee appointed by the military government of Myanmar has completed work on a new draft constitution, state media reported Tuesday. The document was drafted by a 54-member constitution-drafting commission appointed by the junta, despite calls from the UN that the drafting process be open to outside groups. The draft is scheduled to go to [...]

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear five cases , including Herring v. United States (07-513) , where the Court will decide whether evidence seized during a search incident to an arrest must be suppressed when the sole premise for the arrest was information later found to be negligently provided by another law [...]

The Federal Magistrate Court of Australia Tuesday relaxed certain control order restrictions against former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks , permitting him to reside anywhere in the country subject to approval from the Australian Federal Police (AFP) . Hicks will have to report twice a week to the AFP, and will still be barred from [...]

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon Monday refused to comment on the legality of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia, instead calling on all parties to "exercise maximum restraint" in response to the declaration. Ban also reiterated that "the recognition of states" is a decision for other states and not the UN Secretariat. He did not [...]

The six children of former Indonesian President Haji Mohammed Suharto failed to appear in court Tuesday, ignoring a court summons to defend Suharto's estate in a civil corruption case. Suharto's defense lawyer, who wanted to introduce legal expert testimony on behalf of the heirs, was unable to represent Suharto's children because he was unable to [...]

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) conceded defeat Tuesday in parliamentary elections as unofficial results tentatively gave the opposition parties of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif approximately 60 percent of 272 seats in the National Assembly of Pakistan . Musharraf's PML-Q retained approximately 12 percent of [...]

Maureen Aung-Thwin : "The sudden announcement by the Burmese military regime that it would soon hold a national referendum, to be followed by elections in two years, is not a total surprise. The referendum scheduled for May is on a yet-to-be-written new constitution that has been drafted in secrecy since 1993, in a process controlled [...]

Ali Khan : "Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf deserves credit for holding fair elections for the national and provincial parliaments. The opposition parties have won and the President's Party has lost in a big way. It is now time for the President to leave office with honor and dignity. To put Pakistan back on the democratic [...]

The Afghan journalism student who was sentenced to death in January for distributing papers questioning gender roles under Islamic practice will be provided the right to appeal his death sentence in open court, an Afghanistan Supreme Court justice told London's Independent on Monday. Sayad Parwez Kambaksh was convicted of blasphemy for distributing papers questioning why [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Erlinder of William Mitchell College of Law, lead defense counsel for former Major Aloys Ntabakuze in the Military 1 Trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and president of the UN-ICTR Defense Lawyers Association, says that recently issued French and Spanish international war crimes warrants and new evidence at [...]