The US Navy lawyer who successfully represented the plaintiff Guantanamo detainee in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and took his case all the way to the US Supreme Court has been denied a promotion and will leave the military by spring, the Miami Herald reports. Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift , who has worked in the Department of [...]

JURIST is seeking to expand its Webby award-winning staff of professional editors by hiring a talented, public-service oriented individual with law and/or journalism experience to serve as a part-time legal news editor based in California. JURIST's West Coast Editor will share responsibility for managing JURIST's daily research, writing and publishing operations and will help supervise [...]

Leaders of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) on Monday repeated their call for the International Criminal Court (ICC) to lift international arrest warrants against five top LRA leaders, and threatened to continue their violent resistance movement otherwise. Although the Ugandan government and the LRA have pledged to work out a peace agreement, LRA leader Joseph [...]

The UN Security Council Monday nominated Ban Ki-Moon , the current South Korean Foreign Minister, to succeed UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan when Annan's term ends in January. Ban won the Council's nomination after four straw polls in the Security Council definitively favored him over six other contenders from Asian countries. South Korea nominated Ban as [...]

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin has said that France will impose a smoking ban in public locations in February 2007, and will likely extend a smoking ban in restaurants, clubs and bars in 2008. The ban will include schools, train stations, airports, offices, public buildings and other enclosed public spaces. Individuals who violate the [...]

Thai Prime Minister Surayud Chulanont has declined to set a timeline for lifting martial law in Thailand, but will return the country to normalcy "as soon as possible," a government spokesperson said Monday. The spokesperson said the decision would be made in consultation with the new cabinet, which was installed Monday after gaining the approval [...]

Saddam Hussein's genocide trial continued Monday in Baghdad as a witness for the prosecution testified that troops under Hussein's command bulldozed her family into a mass grave. The woman was 13 during the alleged 1988 atrocities, living in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq. She further testified that after the mass burials, she was taken [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Douglas Branson of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law says that the frenzy over the Hewlett-Packard pretexting scandal overlooks not only much that is positive about the company's record, but also the dubious legal advice that the now-indicted corporate leaders received from their outside counsel… Three weeks ago on JURIST I [...]

JURIST Contributing Editor Jeffrey Addicott of St. Mary's University School of Law, formerly a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, says the new Military Commissions Act reflects a clear and much-needed Congressional commitment to the war on terror, which to this point has been largely conducted in legal terms by the [...]

UK Attorney General Lord Goldsmith on Sunday voiced tentative support for a formal, written UK constitution, saying that the possibility merited "serious" consideration. Goldsmith, however, rejected a proposal by Conservative leader David Cameron for a written bill of rights to replace the UK Human Rights Act , Britain's codification of the European Convention on Human [...]