Turkish writer Ipek Calislar was found not guilty Tuesday of "insulting the Turkish identity" in violation of Article 301 of the country's penal code. Calislar went on trial in October for writing that the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, once left his palace disguised as a woman to evade an assassination attempt. He [...]

Romanian President Traian Basescu has told the country's parliament that the "criminal and illegitimate" former Communist regime committed massive human rights violations and crimes against humanity , killing and persecuting as many as two million people between 1945 and 1989 Presenting the 650-page report of a special government commission established to examine the Communist regime [...]

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday ordered his administration to "correct court-identified deficiencies in California's lethal injection protocol to ensure the death penalty procedure is constitutional." In a memorandum of intended decision issued last week, US District Judge Jeremy Fogel said that California's lethal injection protocol creates "an undue and unnecessary risk" of cruel and [...]

Five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor were convicted and sentenced to death Tuesday for knowingly infecting over 400 Libyan patients, primarily children, with the HIV virus. This is the second time a Libyan court has convicted the medics; the initial guilty verdict was overturned by the Libyan Supreme Court in 2005 and a retrial [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Donna Arzt, Director of the Center for Global Law and Practice at Syracuse University College of Law, says that the recent adoption by Geneva Convention states of a Red Crystal symbol to supplement the traditional Red Cross and Red Crescent is a landmark symbolic step reflecting the universal non-exclusionary character of international [...]

Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, Federal Bureau of Investigation, December 18, 2006 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Thirteen men arrested last year in Australia's largest counter-terrorism raid pleaded not guilty to the charges against them during a pre-trial hearing Monday. Eighteen suspects were arrested in raids in Sydney and Melbourne and were charged with membership in a terrorist organization and planning a terrorist attack on Australian soil. The remaining five suspects are [...]

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) filed a notice of charges Monday against three former Fannie Mae executives over their role in fraudulently reporting future earnings so that top executives would receive maximum performance bonuses. The action was taken against former Chairman and CEO Franklin D. Raines, former Vice Chairman and CFO J. [...]

Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning said Monday that he will appeal last week's federal appeals court ruling striking down the state's corporate farming ban to the US Supreme Court. Although Bruning initially indicated he would ask the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit to rehear the case en banc, Bruning said Monday that [...]

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has urged countries to sign and ratify the Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families in order "to provide all migrants with the rights and protection they need and deserve." In a message marking International Migrants Day Monday, Annan decried the [...]