Human Rights Watch denounced Iran on Wednesday for threatening to prosecute the Iranian Center for Defense of Human Rights (CDHR) , a human rights group based in Tehran founded by 2003 Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi. Last week, the Iranian Interior Ministry banned the group, calling it illegal because it did not have a proper [...]

San Diego city officials and management broke federal securities laws by failing to fulfill their fiduciary duties in administering the city's pension fund for police officers, firefighters, and other public officials, according to an independent audit presented to City Council of the investigation, led by former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Arthur Levitt , [...]

The UN Human Rights Council announced Wednesday that it will hold an emergency session on Friday to discuss the ongoing Middle East conflict and its worsening impact on Lebanese citizens. Responding to a special request from Tunisia on behalf of the UN Group of Arab States and the Organization of the Islamic Conference , the [...]

The US military has arrested four Iraqi members of an insurgent kidnapping cell in connection with the kidnapping of Christian Science Monitor reporter Jill Carroll . Carroll was working in Iraq when she was kidnapped on January 7 and released on March 30 of this year. A US official said the arrests were made one [...]

The Serbian government has called for the prosecution of Bosnian military officer Atif Dudakovic after a Serbian television station broadcast a video Tuesday that allegedly shows Dudakovic ordering his troops to burn a Serb village in 1995. The Dudakovic video follows last week's broadcast of a video that allegedly shows the unprovoked murder of a [...]

The Jakarta Court of Appeal has ruled that Indonesian Attorney General Abdul Rahman Saleh was correct to drop a corruption case against former President Suharto , citing Suharto's inability to speak or write due to permanent brain damage . Saleh appealed a lower court ruling in a lawsuit filed by several human rights groups . [...]

Captain Alex Pickands, a US military lawyer prosecuting four US Army soldiers for the March 12 rape of a 14-year old Iraqi girl and the murder of the girl and her family in Mahmudiya , told a military panel in Baghdad during closing arguments on Tuesday that combat stress had nothing to do with the [...]

US District Judge Vaughn Walker of the Northern District of California on Tuesday temporarily stayed a class action lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, pending the appeal of his earlier decision allowing the case to move forward. The EFF lawsuit alleges that AT&T violated citizens' rights to privacy and several federal statutes [...]

The American Bar Association approved a resolution Tuesday condemning President Bush for his "misuse" of bill signing statements to bypass particular provisions of a bill that the president considers unconstitutional or a risk to national security. Last month, an ABA task force released a report with recommendations on signing statements, saying in an accompanying press [...]

Proposed amendments drafted by the Bush administration to revise the War Crimes Act would protect CIA officers, former military personnel and political appointees from prosecution for humiliating and degrading treatment of wartime detainees, according to a report in Wednesday's Washington Post. The 1996 War Crimes Act makes it a felony to violate the Geneva Conventions [...]