UN special envoy to Myanmar Ibrahim Gambari met with opposition leader and democracy advocate Aung San Suu Kyi and with top Myanmar military leader Senior General Than Shwe during separate meetings Tuesday to discuss the rising political crisis in Myanmar, according to reports from foreign diplomats. Suu Kyi was released from house arrest on Sunday [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor David Crane of Syracuse University College of Law, former Chief Prosecutor for the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone, says that the recent meeting at Chautauqua of nine of the twelve living international prosecutors, spanning the Nuremberg Trials to the International Criminal Court, produced a landmark call for governments to back the [...]
JURIST Contributing Editor Geoffrey S. Corn, Lt. Col. US Army (Ret.) and former Special Assistant to the Judge Advocate General for Law of War Matters, now a professor at South Texas College of Law, says that effectively controlling the exponential increase in US reliance on civilian contractors in foreign military operations requires greater clarity regarding [...]
London's Metropolitan Police Service mistakenly killed Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes ' because of a flawed plan to carry out an anti-terrorism operation after the July 21 London transit bombing attempts in 2005, prosecutor Clare Montgomery argued during opening statements Monday in the trial of the London police for breaches of health and safety laws [...]
Lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr asked the US Court of Military Commission Review Monday to reconsider last month's decision reinstating charges against Khadr. In June, military judge Col. Peter Brownback dropped terrorism charges against Khadr, ruling that the court had no jurisdiction because a Guantanamo Combatant Status Review Tribunal found that Khadr was [...]
Four doctors and a New Jersey pharmaceutical company were acquitted Monday of all criminal charges surrounding the dissemination of a tainted blood clotting product in Canada in the 1980s and 1990s, a public health disaster that infected more than 20,000 people with hepatitis C and more than 1,000 people with HIV. Ontario Superior Court Justice [...]
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Monday that it would send a team of investigators to Iraq to study the circumstances surrounding a September shooting incident involving employees of the privately contracted security firm Blackwater USA that left 11 Iraqi civilians dead. According to the FBI, the US State Department has asked it [...]
The trial of controversial al-Dustour editor Ibrahim Eissa on charges of allegedly spreading "rumors" about the health of Egyptian President Hosny Mubarak in an August newspaper report began in Cairo Monday. Eissa chose not to appear for the beginning of his trial, but told reporters that "he whole political society feels the danger of a [...]
A new law protecting private property in China took effect Monday, after it was approved by the Chinese National People's Congress in March. Chinese lawmakers considered the bill for over 13 years and it underwent multiple drafts before legislators agreed on a final version. The law grants equal protections to both public and private property [...]
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in Board of Education of the City of New York v. Tom F. , 06-637, in which the Court considered whether the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) allows tuition reimbursement to the parents of a disabled student when the child has not previously received special education [...]