Jean-Marie Le Pen , leader of France's far-right National Front , kickstarted his fifth bid to become president Sunday with an announcement of plans to reintroduce the death penalty just days after the French parliament voted to amend the French Constitution to include an explicit ban. In a special joint session of both the National [...]

James Jay Carafano : "The United States military has in its custody a number of enemy combatants at the detention facility Guantanamo Bay. Detainees that are a threat to the United States and its friends and allies should be kept off the battlefield as long as they represent a real danger to innocents. Those accused [...]

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) rendered its judgment Monday in the long-anticipated case of Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro , finding that although the Serbian government was not directly responsible for genocide during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war , the country failed to meet its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention to prevent [...]

Canada Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said Sunday that Canada may adopt a British special counsel model to preserve the legality of using its security certificates to indefinitely detain foreigners with suspected ties to terrorism. In the UK, security-cleared special advocates can challenge secret intelligence presented to a court to justify the indefinite detention of [...]

The UK Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) ruled Monday that a convicted terrorist from Jordan must return to his home country despite his arguments that he risks being tortured upon returning to Jordan. SIAC chairman Justice Ouseley said there was no real threat of persecution for Islamic cleric Abu Qatada , basing the commission's decision [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Kevin Govern, Assistant Professor of Law at the US Military Academy, West Point, NY, discusses the evolution of rule of law challenges in Iraq post-2003 and proposes new criteria for achieving and assessing Iraq's status as a "rechtsstaat", i.e. a law-based state… Since 19 March 2003, when Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) commenced, [...]

Eleven South Koreans filed a lawsuit Monday asking the Tokyo District Court to order the removal of their relatives' names from the Yasukuni Shrine , a controversial memorial which many argue is a symbol of Japan's past as a military-driven nation. The plaintiffs include a former soldier and 10 other South Koreans whose fathers were [...]

The Iraqi Oil Ministry indicated Sunday that a recently proposed law regulating oil revenues may be in jeopardy. Members of the ministry have expressed doubt that the Kurdish administration in the north of the country will approve the current draft despite making positive remarks about the law Saturday. Iraqi legislators delivered the law to Iraq's [...]

Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr said in a live television interview with Al Jazeera Sunday that he was "savagely tortured by the CIA when kidnapped" and taken from Milan to Egypt in 2003. Nasr, who has been at the heart of Italian judicial proceedings against US and Italian intelligence agents implicated in his alleged [...]

Lawyers for Australian Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks are filing a claim Monday in the Federal Court of Australia in an attempt to secure Hicks' release. Hicks' Australian defense team, headed by David McLeod, will charge the government with breaching its duty to protect Hicks, as a citizen, by failing to call for a fair [...]