US military judge Navy Capt. Keith Allred has ruled that lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan can send written questions to Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other alleged high-level al Qaeda detainees. Hamdan's lawyers hope that the interviewed detainees will testify that Hamdan was not involved with the USS Cole or 9/11 attacks and [...]
East Timor's attorney general said Friday that 12 arrest warrants have been issued for suspects in this week's attacks against East Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao , but did not release the names of the suspects. Attorney General Longuinhos Monteiro also said that five additional warrants will be issued. Horta [...]
Any unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo from Serbia will be "invalid and void," Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Bozidar Djelic said Thursday, hours before the UN Security Council was scheduled to discuss the possibility of Kosovar secession. Kosovo, the UN protectorate now dominated by ethnic Albanians which is still technically a part of Serbia, is [...]
US President George W. Bush said in a BBC interview Thursday that he will veto an intelligence funding bill that would restrict CIA interrogators to using only interrogation techniques explicitly authorized by the 2006 Army Field Manual. Bush said that: The reason I'm vetoing the bill – first of all, we have said that whatever [...]
The European Commission plans to introduce a proposal to extend copyright protection for music performers from 50 to 95 years, Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy announced Thursday. The proposal will ensure greater protections for "session musicians" who recorded music in the late 1950s and will soon lose their royalty income from radio play of their [...]
The Bush administration filed a petition for certiorari with the US Supreme Court Thursday in the case of Gates v. Bismullah, seeking to limit the information it must provide to courts in cases involving Guantanamo Bay detainees classified as "enemy combatants." Last July, a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC [...]
Awzar Thi : "The news that Burma's government will hold a constitutional plebiscite this May, followed by general elections in 2010, has captured interest and caused some confusion abroad. That the army is intent upon cementing its power in any future government there is beyond question. It has never pretended otherwise. Nor is it necessary [...]
A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Thursday upheld an earlier ruling by a federal district court to vacate the conviction of former Enron CFO Kevin Howard . District Judge Vanessa Gilmore had vacated Howard's conviction in light of an August 2006 opinion by the Fifth Circuit that [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says that the rules of evidence governing the recently announced military commission trials of six alleged al Qaeda members, combined with the Bush administration's efforts to sanitize the legal mess made by the use of illegal interrogation methods, ensure that the trials will fall [...]
Memorandum Order: Hani Saleh Rashid Abdullah et al., v. George W. Bush et al., US District Court for the District of Columbia, February 14, 2008 . Read the full text of the order . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.