The US Department of Defense (DOD) announced Friday that an alleged top al-Qaeda operative has been transferred from CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay. Muhammad Rahim, a former messenger for Osama bin Laden said to have helped the terrorist leader escape from Afghanistan in 2001, was captured by local authorities in Pakistan last summer and turned [...]

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey told an audience in London Friday that he hopes those accused in the 9/11 attacks do not receive the death penalty if found guilty because it would make them martyrs. Mukasey made the comment in response to a question after a speech at the London School of Economics on Anglo-American [...]

Hundreds of Serbs took control of a UN courthouse in the northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica Friday in an apparent protest against Kosovo's recent declaration of independence from Serbia. The group initially demanded a deal with UN authorities, but it was not immediately clear what the details of those demands were. The regional UN representative [...]

The Norwegian government brought forward a draft law Friday that would grant same-sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couples, replacing a 1993 law which merely granted gay couples the right to enter into civil unions. The proposal would allow gay couples to be married in a church but does not require a minister or [...]

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom vetoed a bill Friday that would have restored the country's death penalty . Decree 06-2008 would also have given Colom, sworn into office just last month the power to decide whether to grant clemency and commute the sentences of the 34 inmates currently on death row to 50 years in prison, [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist and British human and medical rights activist Dr. David Nicholl, a neurologist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham, UK, says that Amnesty International's new report into the rendition and torture of one-time "ghost detainee" Khaled al-Maqtari by the CIA highlights yet again the complicity of doctors in the US detention and rendition [...]

United States of America v. Salim Ahmed Hamdan, United States Military Commission, March 14, 2008 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

US military judge Col. Peter Brownback on Friday ruled that interrogation materials, including names of interrogators, relevant to the case of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr must be turned over to Khadr's defense team. Earlier in the week it was unintentionally revealed that one of Khadr's interrogators was Sgt. Joshua Claus, a US interrogator who later [...]

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Friday remanded to district court a bid by Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Belbacha to obtain a preliminary injunction barring his transfer back to his home country of Algeria. The court in January had initially stayed his transfer against the urging of the Bush administration. [...]

A former CIA "ghost detainee" detailed torture and abuse by agency interrogators at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and a secret CIA facility in Afghanistan in an Amnesty International (AI) report released Friday. Khaled Abdu Ahmed Saleh al-Maqtari, a Yemeni national, was held for a total of 32 months after being arrested in Fallujah in January [...]