The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said Thursday that its Division of Corporation Finance will begin drafting an amendment to an SEC Rule under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 which says a company can deny its shareholders the right to vote on a proposal that "relates to an election," including elections of company [...]

Leading Wednesday's international brief, Amnesty International has alleged that efforts by Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe to provide housing for the hundreds of thousands of residents he forcefully evicted in 2005 have fallen well short of international human rights standards. Amnesty's report presents evidence of a complete failure to protect Zimbabweans made homeless by the Zimbabwean [...]

President Bush's announcement that 14 terrorism suspects have been transferred from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay is "significant" but not sufficient, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour said through a spokesman Friday. Instead, Arbour renewed a demand that the prisons be "completely abolished." Last year, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan defended Arbour after [...]

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has called on all European Union (EU) member states to collaborate in stemming the tide of illegal immigrants. On Thursday, Barroso wrote a letter to the heads of the 25 countries of the EU, stating that "the massive arrival of illegal immigrants to the European Union, mainly to the [...]

Michael J. Kelly : "President Bush recently acknowledged the existence of the long-suspected C.I.A. detention facilities that the U.S. has used to interrogate and possibly torture high-value foreign members of al Qaeda captured abroad. This acknowledgement, even as the facilities are being shut down in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. [...]

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 would allow CIA agents and others to use interrogation techniques not condoned by the US Department of Defense and would restrict federal courts' ability to enforce prisoner rights guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions , according to legal experts quoted in Friday's New York Times. On Wednesday, the Pentagon released [...]

A federal judge in Oregon has allowed a lawsuit by the US branch of the Saudi Arabia-based Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation to proceed against the US government over the warrantless wiretapping of communications between the foundation and its attorneys. On Thursday, Judge Garr King of US District Court in Portland denied the government's motion to dismiss [...]

Mexican President-elect Felipe Calderon , who was certified as the winner of Mexico's disputed presidential election earlier this week, said Thursday that he will advocate for US immigration reform to allow Mexicans currently in America without papers to work in the US legally. The US Congress reconvened this week, and on Wednesday, US Senate Majority [...]

A federal judge issued a preliminary ruling and injunction on Thursday to prevent the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from selling oil and gas leases to land near Teshekpuk Lake in Alaska to oil companies. US District Court Judge James Singleton ruled that if the rights to drill for oil on the land were [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Benjamin Davis of the University of Toledo College of Law says that President Bush's acknowledgement that high-level terror detainees have been held in secret CIA prisons should be the beginning of a cleansing process in which leaders of the American executive, legislature, and judicial branches of government and the American people as [...]