The military court system administered by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) often fails to provide full due process rights to Palestinian defendants, according to a report released Sunday by an Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din. An IDF spokesperson dismissed the report, saying that its methodology, in which researchers attended 800 hearings and interviewed court [...]

Malaysian police fired a water cannon at protesters in Kuala Lumpur Saturday and chased them with batons as some 300 demonstrated against the country's controversial Internal Security Act (ISA) , a preventive detention law that allows the Malaysian government to detain suspects for two years without trial and to renew the detention indefinitely. The demonstrators [...]

An Egyptian court has convicted three police officers for torturing and publicly humiliating a suspected thief, according to "judicial sources" cited by Reuters Saturday. The higher-ranking police officer was sentenced to five years in jail, while the two lower-ranking officers were sent to jail for one year each. According to the court, the three officers [...]

Asif Ali Zardari , the husband of slain former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto , called again Saturday for a UN-led international investigation into the circumstances surrounding his wife's assassination . This is the second time Zardari has called for a UN-led inquiry similar to the ongoing probe into the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese [...]

UN rights investigators with the United Nations Human Rights Office in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (UNHRO) have documented serious human rights violations committed in the DRC following post-electoral violence in the capital Kinshasa in March 2007, including summary execution of civilians and excessive force leading to at least 300 deaths. The findings were [...]

Retired Bosnian Serb general Novack Djukic was indicted Friday by the War Crimes Chamber of the Court of Bosnia & Herzegovina for allegedly ordering a 1995 attack on the town of Tuzla in which 71 people were killed. Djukic, who commanded the Bosnian Serb army in the Tuzla region during the Bosnian war , was [...]

Italian prosecutor Franco Ionta said Friday that he would "almost certainly" appeal a Rome court's October 2007 dismissal of a criminal case against US Army Spc. Mario Lozano for the murder of Italian intelligence agent Nicola Calipari and the attempted murders of agent Andrea Carpani and Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena . The comment came after [...]

Jose Padilla et al. v. John Yoo, United States District Court, Northern District of California, January 4, 2008 . Read the full text of the complaint . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The US Supreme Court on Friday granted certiorari in six cases , including Kennedy v. Louisiana (07-343) , in which the Supreme Court will consider whether a death sentence constitutes cruel and unusual punishment when imposed for a crime in which the victim was not killed. Patrick Kennedy was sentenced to death in Louisiana for [...]

Convicted terrorism conspirator Jose Padilla Friday filed suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California against University of California Berkeley law professor John Yoo , the author of controversial US government memos arguing that detained enemy combatants could be denied Geneva Conventions protections against torture. The suit alleges that Yoo's memos, [...]