A US Department of Justice (DOJ) spokesman retreated Wednesday from comments made earlier this week by US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on the case of Canadian Maher Arar in which Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the US was not responsible for his removal to Syria and that he was not aware Arar was tortured there. [...]

A Louisiana grand jury in New Orleans indicted Salvador and Mabel Mangano Wednesday on 35 charges of negligent homicide and 64 charges of cruelty to the infirm from the couple's alleged refusal to evacuate a St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish under a mandatory evacuation order during Hurricane Katrina . Louisiana Attorney General [...]

A judge in Turkey Thursday acquitted Turkish novelist Elif Shafak on charges that she "insulted the Turkish identity" in violation of Article 301 of the country's penal code, for comments referring to an Armenian genocide contained in one of her books. As many as 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the then-Ottoman Empire between 1915 [...]

The US House Judiciary Committee voted 20 to 16 along party lines Wednesday to approve the Electronic Surveillance Modernization Act of 2006 , a measure that would relax warrant requirements for electronic surveillance of certain domestic communications, making such warrants easier and faster to secure. The legislation would also permit wiretaps on US citizens for [...]

The US House Judiciary Committee approved the Military Commissions Act Wednesday 20-19, but only after its Republican leadership harnessed enough votes to overcome an initial 20-17 vote that would have killed the legislation. Key Republican members were missing when the first vote was taken. The House bill closely follows the controversial draft legislation President Bush [...]

US Justice Department Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty argued against the pending Free Flow of Information Act of 2006 during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, saying that a federal shield law for reporters will hinder national security investigations by encouraging people to leak classified information if reporters are protected from revealing their sources. In [...]

An Iraqi woman who attempted to detonate a suicide bomb as part of the 2005 deadly hotel bombings in Amman was sentenced to death Thursday by a Jordanian military court. Sajida al-Rishawi was convicted along with six others who were tried in absentia of conspiracy to carry out a terrorist act causing death and destruction [...]

Clarence Hill , who was convicted of the 1982 murder of a police officer, was executed Wednesday in Florida after the US Supreme Court denied his request to stay the execution. Five justices voted to refuse the stay; Justices Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter and Stevens would have granted the stay of execution. Hill filed a petition [...]

The Hong Kong Court of Appeal Wednesday upheld a 2005 ruling that laws prohibiting gay sex are unconstitutional and discriminatory and violate Hong Kong's Basic Law and the Bill of Rights . The law in the former British colony, now a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, authorizes life sentences for men [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Jonathan Hafetz, Associate Counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, says that the Bush administration’s post-9/11 detainee policies – most recently evidenced in the proposed military commissions bill that would severely limit the habeas corpus power of the federal courts – are a recipe [...]