Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) conceded defeat Tuesday in parliamentary elections as unofficial results tentatively gave the opposition parties of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif approximately 60 percent of 272 seats in the National Assembly of Pakistan . Musharraf's PML-Q retained approximately 12 percent of [...]

Maureen Aung-Thwin : "The sudden announcement by the Burmese military regime that it would soon hold a national referendum, to be followed by elections in two years, is not a total surprise. The referendum scheduled for May is on a yet-to-be-written new constitution that has been drafted in secrecy since 1993, in a process controlled [...]

Ali Khan : "Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf deserves credit for holding fair elections for the national and provincial parliaments. The opposition parties have won and the President's Party has lost in a big way. It is now time for the President to leave office with honor and dignity. To put Pakistan back on the democratic [...]

The Afghan journalism student who was sentenced to death in January for distributing papers questioning gender roles under Islamic practice will be provided the right to appeal his death sentence in open court, an Afghanistan Supreme Court justice told London's Independent on Monday. Sayad Parwez Kambaksh was convicted of blasphemy for distributing papers questioning why [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Erlinder of William Mitchell College of Law, lead defense counsel for former Major Aloys Ntabakuze in the Military 1 Trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and president of the UN-ICTR Defense Lawyers Association, says that recently issued French and Spanish international war crimes warrants and new evidence at [...]

Former Guatemalan Police Director German Chupina, one of eight high ranking government and military officers charged in Spain with genocide, torture, and other crimes against humanity, died Sunday at the age of 86. In December, a Guatemalan court ruled that the eight men, including former dictator Efrain Rios Montt, could not be extradited to Spain, [...]

Pakistan held rescheduled parliamentary elections Monday, after a month-long postponement following the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto . Final tallies are expected in the next few days, although initial results suggest some gains by opposition parties, which have voiced concerns over potential large-scale fraud. BBC News Monday reported several incidents of voting irregularities [...]

Incarcerated former Yukos executive and lawyer Vasily Aleksanian has been kept chained to his bed since his transfer to a Moscow hospital for medical treatment earlier this month, his lawyer said Monday. Aleksanian was initially denied medical transfer by Russian authorities, despite three calls from the European Court of Human Rights to move Aleksanian to [...]

Control orders imposing restrictions on uncharged suspects under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 should not exceed two years in duration except under extraordinary circumstances, the UK's counter-terrorism law ombudsman said in his third annual report Monday. Lord Carlile of Berriew found that the current system of control orders is "a justifiable and proportional safety [...]

The United States and several key European Union powers formally recognized Kosovo as a sovereign state Monday, one day after the Assembly of Kosovo unilaterally declared Kosovo's independence from Serbia. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice issued a statement on behalf of the United States which "formally recognized Kosovo as a sovereign and independent state," [...]