The judge presiding over the much-anticipated corruption trial of former South Africa deputy president Jacob Zuma Monday postponed proceedings until September 5. The prosecution sought to have the trial postponed for further investigation, while the defense sought to have the case withdrawn. Zuma was indicted on corruption charges last November, and has said the charges [...]

Israeli authorities have sentenced an army officer to 28 days in a military prison for refusing to serve in the ongoing Israeli military campaign in Lebanon , according to Israeli media reports Monday. Reserve Captain Amir Paster, 32, an infantry officer and a student at Tel Aviv University, is the first Israeli soldier punished for [...]

The UK High Court on Monday denied a bid by a British lesbian couple married in Canada to have their marriage recognized by British law, saying that the traditional British definition of marriage refers only to a union between a man and a woman with the purpose of reproduction. Sue Wilkinson and Celia Kitzinger had [...]

The UN Security Council Monday passed a resolution giving Iran until August 31 to halt uranium enrichment and threatening sanctions if it does not comply. Resolution 1696 , adopted 14-1 with Qatar voting against, nonetheless requires additional Security Council discussion before sanctions can actually be imposed. Russia and China pressed for the additional flexibility. AP [...]

US federal judges grant and deny asylum to asylum seekers at a disparate rate in the United States, according a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released Sunday. The report examined nearly 300,000 immigration cases from 1994-2005, and found that ten percent of immigration judges denied asylum in 86 percent of their cases, [...]

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Monday in the immediate wake of Israel's airstrike on the south Lebanon village of Qana that it was "alarmed" at what it described as the "recurring lack of respect for international humanitarian law by the warring parties." Condemning the Israeli attack on a civilian target, the [...]

ICTY Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte has appealed the two-year prison sentence for Naser Oric , a former senior commander of Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica convicted of war crimes . The International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted Oric in June for failing to prevent the murder and inhumane treatment of Serb prisoners, [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Anthony D'Amato of Northwestern University School of Law says that the Israeli air strike on Qana that killed over 60 Lebanese civilians has set the stage not only for possible war crimes prosecutions but also for a potentially-robust UN Security Council resolution imposing a UN peacekeeping force on the parties in an [...]

Sexual violence in US prisons, perpetrated by both inmates and prison staff, often goes unreported because abused inmates fear a reprisal or do not trust prison staff, according to a US Department of Justice report released Sunday. The Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) examined reports to prison administrations comprising 78 percent of the [...]

Opening an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council Sunday, hours after an Israeli air strike that killed over 60 civilians in the Lebanese village of Qana, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that "both sides in this conflict bear a heavy responsibility, and there is strong prima facie evidence that both have committed grave breaches [...]