Luis Moreno Ocampo , chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court , told the UN Security Council Wednesday that his investigation into crimes against humanity in Darfur has documented thousands of killings of civilians, large scale massacres, and hundreds of rapes that he anticipates will result in multiple cases rather than a single proceeding . [...]

Secretary General's supplementary report under Article 52 ECHR on the question of secret detention and transport of detainees suspected of terrorist acts, notably by or at the instigation of foreign agencies, Terry Davis, Secretary General of the Council of Europe, June 14, 2006 . Read the full text of the report . Reported in JURIST's [...]

The US House Budget Committee on Wednesday approved legislation that would give the president a line-item veto over individual provisions in spending bills. The Legislative Line-Item Veto Act of 2006 is weaker than the 1996 line-item veto legislation that the US Supreme Court struck down as violating the constitutional separation of powers. The current bill, [...]

Partners in crime: Europe's role in US renditions, Amnesty International, June 14, 2006 . Read the full text of the report Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Council of Europe (COE) Secretary General Terry Davis concluded in a new report published Wednesday that many European governments do not have adequate administrative, judicial, or parliamentary control mechanisms to ensure that their airspace and aircraft are not being used for illegal rendition programs. As part of an ongoing Council probe into alleged CIA rendition [...]

Three independent UN experts in the areas of judicial independence and freedom of expression expressed "grave concern" for "recent attacks against the judiciary of Egypt," and for detaining protesters who rallied in support of several reform-oriented judges. Specifically, the experts condemned a disciplinary panel decision to reprimand pro-reform judge Hisham Bastawisi for "exercising his right [...]

The Serbian Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld 40-year prison sentences for four former members of a special police unit that took orders from then-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to kill ex-Serb President Ivan Stambolic in August 2000. Belgrade's special court convicted eight men of the assassination last year , sentencing them each to 4 to 40 [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to force the US Department of Defense to reveal information collected for a domestic terrorist threats database that was allegedly used to spy on peaceful anti-war protesters across the United States. In February, the ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information [...]

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) has arrested over 2,000 illegal immigrants since May 26 in an effort to crackdown on deported gang members, pedophiles and violent felons who snuck back into the US, officials said Wednesday. Under the nationwide "Operation Return to Sender," half of the illegal immigrants arrested had criminal records [...]

France's Court of Cassation , the highest court in the country, on Wednesday upheld the conviction of American financier George Soros on insider trading charges. Soros said he plans to appeal the ruling to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) . An appeals court ruled in 2005 that Soros' 1988 purchase of French bank [...]