UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak accused Nigeria's national police of widespread human rights violations Monday, telling the UN Human Rights Council that Nigerian police routinely tortured suspects during investigations. Nowak also deplored Nigeria's unsanitary and overcrowded detention facilities, saying that some prisoners even lacked food and water. The UN Human Rights Council is [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Erlinder of William Mitchell College of Law, attorney on appeal for Dr. Sami Al Arian, says that the treatment accorded the acquitted but still detained academic Palestinian activist from Tampa – now on hunger strike and in danger of irreversible renal failure at a federal prison hospital – is abuse of [...]

Committee on the Judiciary, United States House of Representatives, v. Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten, US District Court for the District of Columbia, March 10, 2008 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Former USA Today reporter Toni Locy filed an emergency motion Monday seeking to block a district court ruling finding her in contempt of court for refusing to disclose government sources who provided information about former US Army germ-warfare researcher Dr. Steven J. Hatfill . In his ruling Friday, US District Judge Reggie Walton ordered that, [...]

A Dutch appeals court Monday overturned the conviction of Dutch businessman Guus Kouwenhoven for violating a UN embargo against the government of former Liberian President Charles Taylor . In 2006, a lower court convicted Kouwenhoven of violating the embargo, but acquitted him of war crimes, ruling that he did not have direct knowledge of the [...]

A German lawmaker has launched a challenge to the new EU reform treaty , properly known as the Treaty of Lisbon , asking that Germany's Federal Constitutional Court rule on whether it is legal, according to Monday media reports. A lawyer for Peter Gauweiler of the Christian Social Union told German news magazine Focus that [...]

Registry officials at the International Criminal Court (ICC) met Monday with a delegation of Uganda's rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) to discuss procedural matters regarding the prosecution of several LRA leaders. The ICC said that the meeting was only to discuss procedural issues : As a neutral organ that facilitates fair trial, the Registry does [...]

The US House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit Monday to enforce subpoenas seeking information from former White House legal counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten regarding the US Attorneys firing scandal . Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers (D-MI) said Monday: It is extremely rare that Congress must litigate in order [...]

A Mauritanian detainee held at Guantanamo Bay has threatened to sue US officials, alleging that he has been tortured in US custody. Lawyers for Mohamed Ould Sillahi told Reuters Monday that Sillahi was also tortured by officials in Jordan and Mauritania , whom he is also threatening to sue, after his arrest in 2001 and [...]

Chinese prosecutors increased the number of corruption convictions against government officials by 30 percent in the past five years, according to a Monday report by Chinese Procurator-General Jia Chunwang at the First Session of the 11th National People's Congress. Jia, who has headed the Supreme People's Procuratorate since 2003, said that prosecutors investigated 209,487 and [...]