Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan expressed concern Saturday about "gross and systematic abuses of human rights" taking place in Kenya in the wake of last month's disputed presidential election . Annan is in the country to help mediate the conflict between Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and opposition candidate Raila Odinga . Annan acknowledged that the [...]

The military government of Myanmar continues to arrest political dissidents despite assurances given by Prime Minister Thein Sein in November that the arrests had stopped and no more would take place, Amnesty International reported Friday. There have been 96 arrests since November and at least 700 of those arrested during September protests and 1,150 political [...]

Sharon Bradford Franklin : "The State Secrets Protection Act (S. 2533), introduced this week by Senators Kennedy and Specter, would bring much needed reform to the state secrets privilege. The doctrine has been problematic since it was first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953 in United States v. Reynolds. In that case, the [...]

Amrit Singh : ""Ours is a government of laws." "No one is above the law: not the executive, not the Congress, and not the judiciary." With these words, on September 15, 2004, a federal judge in New York ordered the CIA to produce or identify all records responsive to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act [...]

Hanih Saleh Rashid Abdullah et al., v. George W. Bush et al., US District Court for the District of Columbia, January 24, 2008 . Read the full text of the memorandum order . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

A senior Spanish official said Friday that Spanish authorities have initiated legal proceedings to ban two Basque political parties for ties to ETA , the armed Basque separatist movement. Spanish Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said the government has evidence that both the Basque Nationalist Action Party (ANV) and the Communist [...]

Charles Stimson : "The Congress should provide appropriate retroactive liability protection for telecommunication companies alleged to have assisted the government since September 11th. Such protection or "immunity" is necessary for several reasons: it is fair to those companies who responded to the governments' request for lawful assistance; it encourages the private sector to assist the [...]

Vidoje Blagojevic , former commander of the Bratunac Brigade of the Bosnian Serb Army, was transferred to Norway Friday to serve the remainder of his 15-year sentence for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre . The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 2005 sentenced Blagojevic to 18 years in prison after [...]

US Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Friday that he does not plan to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations that the US Central Intelligence Agency ordered the destruction of videotapes showing the interrogation of terror suspects , despite requests by some in Congress. At a press briefing, Mukasey said the investigation was opened merely [...]

Slovenian Interior Minister Dragutin Mate said Friday that a European Union plan to archive and exchange air passenger data had general support among EU ministers and could take effect as early as 2009. Interior ministers from EU member countries discussed the Passenger Name Record (PNR) plan at a Friday conference in Slovenia, the current holder [...]