Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov Friday defended a Russian government directive earlier this week to shut down local offices of the British Council by January 1, saying that the offices in Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg were originally established in breach of international and Russian law. Russian authorities insist the Council has violated Russian tax laws. [...]
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Libyan Foreign Minister Abdel-Rahman Shalqam Friday denied that Libya engages in torture in response to a lawsuit filed Wednesday by a Palestinian doctor detained in Libya after being accused of deliberately infected hundreds of children with the HIV virus. Ashraf Jima Hajuj filed the lawsuit against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi , as well as five [...]
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has launched a criminal probe of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) Stuart Bowen on allegations that he misappropriated taxpayer money to pay for his legal defense during a 2006 administrative probe and that he improperly accessed employees' emails, according to a Thursday report in CongressDaily. The [...]
UN special envoy for human rights defenders and co-founder of the independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan Hina Jilani told US lawmakers in Washington Thursday that Pakistan's parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8 have already been rigged and that there was no point in sending election monitors or observers to them. Jilani, an outspoken Lahore [...]
Counter-Terrorism Policy and Human Rights: 42 days, Joint Committee on Human Rights, December 14, 2007 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.
US District Judge Joan A. Lenard Thursday ordered a mistrial in a terrorism case against six men charged with allegedly conspiring to bomb the Sears Tower in Chicago and the FBI headquarters in Miami, after the jury was unable to reach a verdict after nine days of deliberations. A seventh man, Lyglenson Lemorin, was acquitted [...]
The Spanish National Court Thursday dismissed a complaint against Cuban President Fidel Castro and former Cuban tourism minister Osmani Cienfuegos, alleging that the two had committed crimes against humanity. The complaint alleged that Castro and Cienfuegos were responsible for the death of nine prisoners during the 1961 anti-Castro Bay of Pigs Invasion . The court [...]
UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism Martin Scheinin said Thursday that the destruction of CIA videotapes suggests that US interrogators may have violated international prohibitions against torture. Scheinin told reporters after the presentation of his latest report to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that he believes the CIA continues to use [...]
The Supreme Court of South Korea Thursday upheld the sentence of Michael Jang, a Korean American convicted of spying for North Korea In April, the Seoul District Court in South Korea sentenced five people to jail for espionage. Group ringleader Jang initiated contact with North Korean agents in 1998 and first established a spy ring [...]
The US House of Representatives voted 222-199 Thursday to pass an intelligence funding bill that would restrict CIA interrogators to using only those interrogation techniques explicitly authorized by the 2006 Army Field Manual. Army interrogation guide Field Manual 2-22.3 explicitly prohibits the use of waterboarding, electrocution, sensory deprivation, inducing hypothermia, or depriving the subject of [...]
