The United Nations Security Council has extended the mandate for International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte until December 31, the war crimes tribunal announced Friday. Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney general, has served two four-year terms as the ICTY chief prosecutor. She was initially expected to step-down in [...]

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice released the annual State Department Report on International Religious Freedom Friday, criticizing what it considered to be sharp decreases in religious freedom and an increase in religious strife in several nations, including Iraq. The report found that Iraqis' ability to freely practice the religion of their choice is severely [...]

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said Friday that US President George W. Bush was a "war criminal" comparable to Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein and that he would eventually be brought before an international tribunal to answer for his actions. In a sermon at Tehran University marking the start of Ramadan, Khamenei accused the [...]

The White House submitted a new Benchmark Assessment Report on Iraq to Congress Friday, noting that little progress had been made by the Iraqi government toward accomplishing 18 "benchmarks" thought to be essential to Iraq's stability. The Initial Benchmark Assessment Report , submitted to Congress in July, had reported that the Iraqi government was making [...]

Zhao Yan , a New York Times researcher who was sentenced to three years in prison for fraud in August 2006, is to be released on Saturday, according to Chinese prison officials. A Chinese court convicted Zhao of taking $2,500 from a village official, but dismissed more serious charges of illegally leaking state secrets to [...]

Victims of Saddam Hussein's government filed a class action lawsuit against the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) and its US subsidiary in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York , AWB officials said Friday. The suit alleges that AWB contributed to injuries and damages suffered by Iraqi citizens by giving substantial assistance [...]

Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Thursday called for the resignation of Iraq Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani in response to Shahristani's remarks that oil contracts signed by the KRG with several global companies are illegal. At a Tuesday meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) , Shahristani contended the contracts are illegal because the [...]

The Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) released a report Wednesday saying that fair use exceptions to US copyright laws create more than $4.5 trillion in revenue in the US annually, employ millions of workers, and represented one-sixth of the total US GDP in 2006. The report, released at a briefing on Capitol Hill, indicates [...]

2007 Report on International Religious Freedom, US Department of State, September 14, 2007 . Read the full text of the report. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Google called for new international laws to protect personal information online at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference Friday, urging that an international body such as the UN or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) create the guidelines. Google global privacy attorney Peter Fleischer noted that the existing guidelines [...]