War crimes complaint against former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top US officials and advisors filed with the German Federal Prosecutor on behalf of eleven former Abu Ghraib detainees and one Guantanamo detainee all claiming to have been victims of US torture, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and others, November 14, 2006. Read [...]

US District Judge Reggie B. Walton denounced the disparity in federal sentencing requirements for possession of crack cocaine and cocaine powder in testimony Tuesday before the US Sentencing Commission . Citing the 100-1 differential (5 grams of crack carry a mandatory 5 year sentence while it takes 500 grams of cocaine to get that same [...]

US Marine Cpl. Trent D. Thomas pleaded not guilty Tuesday at his arraignment hearing to charges of murder, kidnapping, and other offenses related to the death of an Iraqi man in Hamdania . Thomas is among several servicemen accused of kidnapping Hashim Ibrahim Awad and leaving him by the side of the road with a [...]

Incoming US Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) said Tuesday that his committee's priorities will include an investigation into CIA extraordinary rendition flights . In an interview with the Financial Times, Levin said he was uncomfortable with the system and believes "that there's been some significant abuses which have not made us more [...]

Bosnia's national war crimes court sentenced a former Bosnian Serb soldier to 16 years in prison Tuesday in the first judgment handed down against a defendant transferred to Bosnia from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. The War Crimes Chamber of the State Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina convicted and [...]

Giovanni Di Stefano : "Below are the names of those Iraq detainees who are subject to a 2004 agreement between the UK/Italy and the Iraqi government witnessed by the US Government that whilst capital punishment can be imposed as a sentence cannot actually have such sentence executed. All were 'captured' or surrendered in 2003 in [...]

UK Attorney General Lord Peter Goldsmith said Tuesday in an interview on BBC Radio 4 that he wants to examine whether new religious hate legislation passed in Parliament earlier this year and scheduled to come into force in February could fill a "gap" in existing law supposedly pointed up by Friday's acquittals of two British [...]

The UK Parliament's Joint Committee on Human Rights has said that Britain's Human Rights Act has "been used as a convenient scapegoat for unrelated administrative failings within government," in a new report released Tuesday. Several members of the British government, including Prime Minister Tony Blair, have lately called for possible revisions to the Act , [...]

Recently released Turkish-German Guantanamo Bay detainee Murat Kurnaz has told Turkey's CNN Turk that while he was at the US military prison he was subjected to systematic torture at the hands of US personnel, including electric shocks, having his head submerged in water and being shackled to the ceiling for days at a time. Kurnaz [...]

A federal judge ruled Monday that officials at the Southern Michigan Correctional Facility must stop using non-medical restraints on prisoners because the "practice constitutes torture and violates the Eighth Amendment." Judge Richard Enslen of the US District Court for the Western District of Michigan issued the opinion in the case of Timothy Souders, a mentally [...]