The jury in the Zacarias Moussaoui sentencing trial heard testimony Wednesday that, during a visit to Malaysia in 1999, a man matching Moussaoui's description told Islamic militant Fauzi bin Abu Bakar Bafana that he he'd had a dream about flying a commercial airliner into the White House. According to a 2002 videotaped disposition played in [...]

Britain's chief inspector of prisons has expressed concern after Muslim inmates in London's maximum-security Belmarsh Prison – dubbed "the UK's Guantanamo Bay" by the British press – told authorities that the staff did not understand their social and religious behavior. Chief Inspector Anne Owers said in a report based an unannounced October visit and survey [...]

The US State Department on Wednesday named North Korea, Burma and Iran among the world's biggest human rights offenders in its 2005 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices , saying that "countries in which power is concentrated in the hands of unaccountable rulers tend to be the world's most systematic human rights violators." The reports [...]

The chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay denied Tuesday that detainees at the facility were tortured, but acknowledged the vagueness of the definition of torture itself. USAF Col. Morris Davis of the Pentagon's Office of Military Commissions will prosecute 10 Guantanamo detainees. Davis said in an AP interview before a talk at [...]

Serbian officials have criticized prison officials from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for failing to prevent the suicide of Milan Babic , former wartime leader of Croatia's rebel Serbs during the Balkan wars. Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Draskovic said that ICTY prison authorities bear the responsibility for the suicide happening in their [...]

The US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will vote in April on legislation to improve port security at American ports, according to committee chair Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) . Collins hopes that the recent controversy over the purchase of control of several major US ports by Dubai-based DP World will encourage passage of [...]

Leading Wednesday's international brief, a bill passed by the out-going Fatah party in the Palestinian Authority which granted Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas greater presidential powers, including the power to set up a constitutional court staffed by judges picked by the president, has been referred to the Palestinian Supreme Court. The referral follows heated debates in [...]

Appellate judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on Wednesday reduced the sentence of former Bosnian Serb army commander Momir Nikolic to 20 years, saying the lower chamber erred by failing to recognize Nikolic's cooperation with prosecutors. As part of a plea agreement , Nikolic pleaded guilty in 2003 to one count [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist William Banks of Syracuse University College of Law says that even if legal authority is found for the NSA domestic surveillance program, such spying still violates the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution protecting Americans against unreasonable search and seizure… The political minuet being performed in recent weeks between angry members of [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Brian Concannon Jr., Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, says that Haitian President-elect Rene Preval faces a daunting if familiar series of legal obstacles involving parliament, the judiciary and the police as he attempts to move forward with economic and social reforms following his latest election victory… [...]