Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) Wednesday laid out an ambitious agenda for the reshuffled Senate Judiciary Committee he will chair when the Democratic-controlled US Congress begins its new session in January. Speaking at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, Leahy, who will take over from current Republican chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), promised what he called [...]

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) Wednesday laid out an ambitious oversight agenda for the reshuffled Senate Judiciary Committee he will chair when the Democratic-controlled US Congress begins its new session in January. Speaking at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, Leahy, who will take over from current Republican chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), promised what he [...]

A Zimbabwe government spokesman said Wednesday that there are no plans to hand Mengistu Haile Mariam over to Ethiopian authorities after the former Ethiopian dictator was convicted of genocide Tuesday by Ethiopia's Federal Court at the conclusion of a 12-year in absentia trial. Mengistu and 72 other former officials were charged with genocide, imprisonment, homicide, [...]

A court in Yemen Wednesday prohibited the editor of Yemen's al-Hurriya newspaper and one of its reporters from writing for one month and also imposed a four-month suspended sentence on them for demeaning Islam by reprinting cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad . The journalists, who say they will appeal, claimed they had published the cartoons [...]

A Human Rights Watch study of the five-year trial of late Yugoslav ex-president Slobodan Milosevic released Wednesday has proposed making changes in future national and international war crimes trial procedures that would increase their likelihood of success. Milosevic died of a heart attack in March 2006 while still in detention, without a verdict having been [...]

A panel of the UK Law Lords , the legal members of the House of Lords who constitute the UK's highest court, ruled unanimously Wednesday that British police infringed the rights of anti-war protestors traveling to a demonstration outside a Royal Air Force base near Fairford, Gloucestershire, in March 2003 by stopping their buses, searching [...]

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda Wednesday convicted a Roman Catholic priest for committing genocide and extermination during the mass killings of Tutsis and moderate Hutus that swept the central African nation in 1994. Father Athanase Seromba was acquitted of less charges of complicity and incitement, but was nonetheless sentenced to 15 years in prison. [...]

Members of the Ohio Senate voted 21-12 Tuesday to override outgoing Ohio Governor Robert Taft's veto of a revised concealed-carry gun law that Taft claimed would preempt local gun-related legislation in some 80 Ohio communities. The House approved an override last week, making this the first time since 1977 that the Ohio legislature has successfully [...]

Israel's Supreme Court Tuesday unanimously overturned a law barring Palestinians from claiming compensation from the Israeli state in respect of damages suffered in "conflict zones" in Gaza and the West Bank. The so-called Intifada law had been challenged by a coalition of nine human rights groups led by the Israeli-Arab rights organization Adalah . The [...]

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling is expected to report to a minimum security federal prison in Waseca, Minnesota to begin a 24-year sentence for fraud, conspiracy and insider trading after a three-judge panel of the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled late Tuesday against his application for bail pending appeal of his sentence. Skilling [...]