New Jersey Superior Court Judge Carol Higbee has issued an order striking down about 50 lawsuits brought by British plaintiffs in the New Jersey state court against Merck & Co. , the manufacturer of the drug Vioxx , which has caused health problems for thousands of arthritis patients both in the US and abroad. In [...]

Khalid al-Dulaimi , lead counsel for Saddam Hussein, said Sunday that the defense team will continue its boycott of Hussein’s genocide trial when it resumes Monday. The protest began when chief judge Abdullah al-Amiri was replaced by judge Mohammad Oreibi al-Khalifa at the insistence of the Iraqi government. Oreibi al-Khalifa has attempted to impose strict [...]

Italian prosecutors Saturday announced the end of their investigation into the alleged CIA kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr in 2003. The cleric, also known as Abu Omar, was seized on the streets of Milan, supposedly by CIA agents with the help of Italy’s Military Intelligence and Security Service (SISMI) . Prosecutors are [...]

Terrorism Watch List Screening, Government Accountability Office, October 7, 2006 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

The head of the justice committee that reviews draft legislation in Turkey's parliament warned in an interview published in a Turkish newspaper Saturday that if France attempts to make it a crime to deny that the Ottoman Empire's treatment of the Armenians in 1915-18 was genocide, Turkey could pass a law penalizing anyone who denies [...]

Former US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will be one of three justices on a panel hearing cases next week for the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit . Under federal law , current or former federal judges can decide cases for any equal or lower federal court by special appointment. [...]

Ali Khan : "The world will mourn today's brutal murder of Russian journalist and human rights advocate Anna Politkovaskay in Moscow. In writing my book, A Theory of International Terrorism (2006), I relied on Anna Politkovaskaya's reports about the situation in Chechnya that she always delivered with passionate clarity. Below is the story of a [...]

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper told US President George W. Bush in a telephone conversation Friday that Canada was filing an official protest regarding the US treatment of Maher Arar , a Canadian citizen detained by US authorities on a 2002 stopover at JFK airport in New York and sent to Syria, where he was [...]

New Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Arthur Hunter on Friday released four inmates from jail who he claims were being held in violation of their constitutional right to adequate legal representation after the Hurricane Katrina disaster . Hunter postponed the trials until effective counsel can be provided to the inmates, charged with three misdemeanor [...]

Defense attorneys for Jose Padilla , now formally accused of being an al Qaeda agent, moved this week to dismiss the charges against him based on allegedly illegal actions by the prosecution. Padilla's attorneys accuse the US government of subjecting him to severe physical abuse and threats, including sleep deprivation and stress positions, during his [...]