Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has agreed to meet with opposition leaders to discuss constitutional reforms, after the parties threatened to boycott the April elections. Thaksin dissolved Parliament on February 24 in response to street protests calling for his removal and set general elections for April 2. One issue on the ballot will be whether [...]

A Serbian who may prove to be a key witness in the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in Madrid for the murder of a human rights leader in Kosovo, Spanish police said Monday. Veselin Vukotic and two other men allegedly shot and killed Enver Hadri, an ethnic Albanian and advocate of [...]

Public hearings on the merits of a case alleging state-sponsored genocide by Serbia and Montenegro opened Monday at the Hague-based International Court of Justice . Proceedings technically began in March 1993, when Bosnia filed a claim alleging violations of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide against the former Yugoslavia during the [...]

US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) has begun circulating a draft version of a bill that would require the federal government to obtain permission before conducting domestic surveillance . The bill, which Specter first mentioned earlier this month , would mandate that the attorney general get a warrant from the special court created [...]

An Australian man plans to appeal his conviction for receiving money and a plane ticket from an Osama bin Laden associate, his lawyer said Monday. Joseph Terrence Thomas was found guilty by a jury over the weekend for receiving $3,500 from Khaled bin Attash , a senior al Qaeda member, after training with the terrorist [...]

Saddam Hussein has ended a hunger strike to protest his trial after fasting for 11 days, according to his chief lawyer Monday. Khalil Dulaimi met with his client for several hours over the weekend and learned that US prison officials stepped in, prompting Hussein to stop the hunger strike for health reasons. Dulaimi indicated that [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Heidi Kitrosser of the University of Minnesota School of Law says that White House arguments in defense of the NSA domestic surveillance program are pushing the limits of Presidential secrecy beyond proper constitutional bounds… Two of the most frequent and most apt criticisms made about the secret Presidential order authorizing spying by [...]

China will increase the number of public trials for death penalty appeals during the second half of 2006, a legal scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said Monday. Liu Renwen estimated that China executes approximately 8,000 people per year, giving the country the highest number of executions in the world. The Supreme Court [...]

Police in the Philippines Monday charged 16 people with rebellion for allegedly planning to oust Philippines President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo , according to the head of the police legal department. The coup plot involved five members of the Philippines House of Representatives , soldiers, a communist rebel leader, and Philippines Senator Gregorio Honasan , who participated [...]

Leading Monday's international brief, despite the status of Hamas as a listed terrorist entity, the European Union has announced plans at a foreign ministers' meeting Monday to attempt to work around a legal ban that prohibits European nations from providing funding to any member of Hamas. Since Hamas' victory in Palestinian elections in January, the [...]