Federal Communications Commission chief Michael J. Copps said Monday that the agency should investigate the access to domestic customers' phone records allegedly granted to the National Security Agency (NSA) by telecommunications giants Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth . Reacting to reports that the companies complied with NSA requests to look at the records, Copps said that [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Chandra Lekha Sriram, Chair of Human Rights at the University of East London School of Law (UK), says that the UK government's push to limit the application of the Human Rights Act in matters of public safety is politically dubious and legally unjustifiable… When it was revealed that the US program of [...]

The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights has claimed in a new report that Russia is maintaining secret prisons in Chechnya and is using them for kidnapping and torturing separatist Chechens in violation of European and Russian laws. The group submitted the report to Dick Marty , the Chairperson of the Committee on Legal Affairs [...]

President Bush has imposed a US travel ban on Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko and his associates. In a proclamation released Monday, Bush cited election fraud, corruption and human rights violations as reasons for the ban, saying that its targets are those who "undermine or injure democratic institutions or impede the transition to democracy in Belarus." [...]

Address to the Nation on Immigration Reform, President George W. Bush, May 15, 2006 . Excerpt: For decades, the United States has not been in complete control of its borders. As a result, many who want to work in our economy have been able to sneak across our border, and millions have stayed. Once here, [...]

US President George W. Bush on Monday evening announced the deployment of up to 6000 National Guard troops to the Mexican border as a prime element in a wide-ranging plan to 'fix' problems created by illegal immigration advanced in a nationally-televised address ahead of renewed Congressional debate on immigration reform legislation. Denying this was militarization [...]

List of Individuals Detained by the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba from January 2002 through May 15, 2006, US Department of Defense, May 15, 2006. Read the full list of names. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The Pentagon Monday released the names of 759 current and former Guantanamo prisoners pursuant to a court-approved agreement with the Associated Press, which had separately sued the Defense Department under the Freedom of Information Act to disclose the names of Guantanamo Bay detainees. The list adds some 201 names to a Pentagon list released in [...]

Hollinger Inc. , the Canadian holding company with an interest in the newspaper publishing giant Hollinger International , has agreed to cooperate with the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois in the investigation and prosecution of former CEO Conrad Black and other former Hollinger executives. Black faces criminal fraud charges in connection [...]

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair on Monday called for a "profound re-balancing of the civil liberties debate" in the United Kingdom as he announced a series of policy consultations over the next several months to discuss public service reform, including the criminal justice system, designed to help formulate the manifesto for the governing Labour Party [...]