Serbian war crimes suspect Vojislav Seselj failed to appear in court Monday as his trial began at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) . The court subsequently stripped Seselj of his right to represent himself and summoned court-appointed defense lawyers to represent him. Seselj, who has been on hunger strike for two [...]

Many of the efforts to soften the corporate accountability reforms of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act are being pushed by the same corporations that employed questionable accounting and business practices before the Sarbanes-Oxley reforms, New York state attorney general and governor-elect Eliot Spitzer said in an interview with the Financial Times published Monday. Last week, US [...]

An Australian government commission investigating Australian participation in the now-defunct UN oil-for-food program in Iraq has recommended that criminal charges be brought against 12 business executives for paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein's former regime . In a report formally submitted to Parliament Monday, the Cole Commission confirmed earlier UN reports that the Australian Wheat Board [...]

French foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said Sunday that the issuance of arrest warrants for nine senior Rwandan government officials relating to the 1994 plane crash of President Juvenal Habyariman was simply a judicial act by anti-terrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere and was not a political act endorsed by the French government. In a radio interview Douste-Blazy [...]

The chief prosecutor in Saddam Hussein's genocide trial said Sunday that audio tapes and documentation proving that Hussein personally ordered the 1988 gassing of Kurdish villagers will be submitted to the court hearing his case. Munqith al-Faroon told Reuters that he possesses tapes of meetings between Saddam and senior Baathist officials revealing that Hussein had [...]

Israel's High Court ruled Sunday that a proposed portion of Israel's Security Fence running north of Jerusalem is legal despite its segregation of five villages and about 1,500 Palestinians from the rest of Israel. Many of the villagers hold Israeli identification cards. Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote: e accept the State's position that there is [...]

UN Independent Expert on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights in Liberia Charlotte Abaka, recently returned from an 11-day visit to that country, has called on the Liberian government to press ahead with its Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and appoint members to its Independent National Commission on Human Rights (INCHR). The TRC was [...]

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet publicly assumed "full political responsibility" for the actions of his 1973-90 military regime in a statement released Saturday. The statement was read aloud by his wife at the celebration of Pinochet's 91st birthday, and marked the first time Pinochet has taken responsibility for his regime's actions, which included human rights [...]

Nepal's House of Representatives Sunday passed a citizenship bill granting opportunity to apply for citizenship to an estimated four million people living in the Terai region along the country's southern border with India. The bill declares that individuals born before mid-April 1990 and who have been residing in Nepal since that date, are eligible to [...]

In a controversial meeting late Saturday the Lebanese cabinet of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora renewed its agreement to the terms of a UN-supported international tribunal to try suspects accused of assassinating former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. The approval came over the objections of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud , the militant Shiite Hezbollah [...]