Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told fellow members of his country's ruling party Saturday that French President Jacques Chirac has apologized to him for the French National Assembly's passage on Thursday of a bill making it a crime to deny that mass killings of Armenians in Turkey during World War I constituted genocide. The [...]

Iraq’s Interior Ministry announced Saturday that 3,000 members of its Shiite-led police force have been fired since May and top commanders have been reshuffled amid ongoing accusations of corruption and human rights violations. Up to 600 department employees will face prosecution. Abdul-Karim Khalaf, spokesman for the Interior Ministry, told AP that the steps were taken [...]

Jaafar al-Mussawi, chief prosecutor in the trial of Saddam Hussein , said Sunday that court proceedings will not resume Monday as scheduled. The Iraqi High Tribunal is instead expected to announce the date the verdict against Hussein and his co-defendants will be delivered on crimes against humanity charges arising from the killing of villagers at [...]

Chief US Marine Corps defense counsel Col. Carol Joyce has ordered a top Marine Corps lawyer and a paralegal to refrain from speaking with the press concerning allegations of widespread abuse of prisoners by guards at Guantanamo Bay , a military spokesperson confirmed Saturday. The order, initially revealed by Muneer Ahmad , a civilian defense [...]

The UN Security Council Saturday voted to impose sanctions on North Korea (DPRK) in response to the country's reported underground nuclear test on October 9. The resolution passed unanimously in a 15-0 vote and imposed enforcement measures in accord with Chapter VII of the UN Charter . It adopts many of the measures proposed by [...]

French state rail network SNCF announced Friday that since June 2006 it has received about 1200 claims related to its role in helping the Nazis to transport people, mostly Jews, to concentration and death camps during Germany's occupation of France in World War II. The complaints follow a successful case brought against SNCF by European [...]

Switzerland's top Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner Hanspeter Thür said Friday that Swiss banks violated national secrecy laws when they failed to inform customers using the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) international banking cooperative service that their personal data could be disclosed to third parties, including the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [...]

Members of the Australian Lawyers Alliance have voted unanimously to condemn the Australian government's handling of the case of Australian national David Hicks , held by American authorities at Guantanamo Bay after being captured in Afghanistan in 2001. Hicks stands accused of fighting against the United States and its allies as an "enemy combatant", but [...]

The European Union (EU) Friday condemned passage of a French bill making it a crime punishable by imprisonment to deny that the mass killing of Armenians in Turkey during World War I was genocide. The bill passed France’s lower house on Thursday but still needs approval by the French Senate and President Jacques Chirac to [...]

A Russian court has shut down the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society (ORCD) , a Chechen human rights group that has been exposing abuses against civilians in Chechnya and providing assistance to victims of violence. The decision follows the February conviction of group co-founder Stanislav Dmitriyevsky , who was charged with “inciting racial hatred.” Dmitriyevsky was convicted [...]