The judicial panel of the UK House of Lords, also known as the Law Lords, Wednesday upheld a controversial ban on hunting with hounds under the Hunting Act 2004 . The Lords said that overturning the ban, which prohibits fox and deer hunting and rabbit coursing with dogs in England and Wales, would subvert the [...]

Ousted Pakistani Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry Tuesday urged Pakistan's political parties and people to boycott parliamentary elections scheduled for January 8, saying that they were comprised by being held under unconstitutional emergency rule and should not proceed because Pakistan was in unusual circumstances with the rights of its judges, lawyers and people restricted or [...]

A Greek appeals court Tuesday dismissed criminal charges against former Getty Museum curator Marion True for her alleged involvement in the looting of an ancient gold wreath from Greece. The Los Angeles museum acquired the wreath in 1993, and Greek prosecutors brought charges against True alleging that the artifact had been illegally removed from the [...]

Political arrests in China more than doubled in 2006 compared to the previous year, according to a report Wednesday from human rights group Dui Hua . The 2007 Chinese Law Yearbook revealed that the state arrested 604 individuals for "endangering state security" in 2006, the highest number since 2002. In 2005, China arrested 296 individuals [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Haider Ala Hamoudi of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law says that the Sunni-Shi’i divide in the Iraqi parliament is only one split complicating the passage of controversial legislation in the troubled state… Conventional wisdom seems to suggest that the ability of Iraq’s legislative body, the National Assembly, to pass crucial [...]

An Egyptian court sentenced three police officers to seven years in prison late Tuesday for torturing 38-year-old carpenter Nasr Abdullah to death in July. The sentencing is part of the country's recent crackdown on police brutality. Earlier this month, two police officers were sentenced to three years in prison for sodomizing and beating Emad el-Kabir [...]

The appeals chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on Tuesday affirmed the genocide and crime against humanity convictions of former lawmaker and retired colonel Aloys Simba . The appeals chamber also affirmed Simba's 25-year prison sentence . Simba's defense team challenged his conviction on multiple grounds – including the form of the [...]

Russian officials said Wednesday that leaders in the country want to replace the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with a formal, binding agreement with the US that will limit the creation of new nuclear weapons. The treaty, which signaled the end of the Cold War , will expire in 2009. US President George Bush's [...]

The Simon Wiesenthal Center announced Tuesday that it will extend its campaign to capture and prosecute suspected Nazi war criminals to four South American countries. In a press conference in Buenos Aires, director Efraim Zuroff outlined the details of Operation Last Chance , which will offer rewards to anyone providing information that leads to the [...]

Sawsaan Tabbaa et al. v. Michael Chertoff et al., United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, November 26, 2007 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.