Election officials announced Saturday that citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo approved a new constitution in a referendum held December 18. The charter is designed to bring peace to the country after five years of war and provides for national elections to be held next year. International observers declared the vote to have been [...]

The US military will not transfer detainees to Iraqi-operated prisons or transition US-run facilities to Iraqi control until military officials are satisfied that Iraqis have met US standards for the treatment of detainees, according to Maj. Gen. John D. Gardner, commanding US-run prisons in Iraq. The decision was made after two raids of Iraqi run [...]

An Iraqi court ruled Saturday that some 100 as-yet-publicly-unspecified candidates – most believed to be Sunnis – who ran in the December 15 Iraqi parliamentary elections will be struck and not allowed to serve in the next national assembly due to previous associations with Saddam Hussein's now-defunct Baath Party . Commentators fear the decision will [...]

The government of Peru has approved 12 of the 17 charges proposed by the country's Supreme Court against former president Alberto Fujimori , currently detained in Chile after being arrested there in November when he returned from self-imposed exile in Japan. Peru is expected to file an extradition request with Chile before the January 6 [...]

French Judge Brigitte Raynaud has decided to open a formal investigation into accusations that French soldiers may have acted in complicity with Hutu militias who killed between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide . Several Rwandan survivors filed a lawsuit against the French government in February of this year, alleging that French [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has again cautioned the Uzbekistan government to observe fair-trial standards after Uzbek courts sentenced another 42 people to 12-20 years in prison during closed hearings Wednesday. Arbour, concerned that the latest trials may have been plagued by the same problems as previous trials , including inadequate counsel [...]

The United Kingdom and Lebanon have signed a memorandum of understanding that specifies that non-UK citizens deported from Britain to Lebanon will not be mistreated. According to a foreign office spokesperson in London, the agreement seeks to protect the human rights of any person deported to Lebanon through the courts and independent monitoring, and is [...]

Former Egyptian presidential challenger and Al-Ghad opposition party leader Ayman Nour was sentenced Saturday to five years in prison on charges that he forged signatures required for his name to be on presidential ballots. Nour's lawyer said "This is a political verdict that will be annulled by the appeal court." Nour, himself a lawyer, has [...]

National Security Agency technicians have been analyzing large volumes of phone and internet traffic information going through American telecomunications data hubs as part of the warrantless surveillance program authorized by President Bush to identify individuals having connections to Al Qaeda, according to officials quoted by the New York Times in a report published Saturday. The [...]

A spokesman for the Iraqi High Criminal Court (formerly the Iraqi Special Tribunal ) trying Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants said Saturday that a Kurdish investigative judge for the tribunal had been targeted in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. Munir Hadad , one of 20 investigative judges, was going through a Baghdad neighborhood Friday in an [...]