The Catholic church is pushing the UK government to establish a committee to consider lowering the legal limit on abortions from the current 24 weeks allowed by the 1967 Abortion Act , UK Archbishop Rev. Peter Smith said Wednesday during an interview on the BBC Breakfast program. The proposed committee would involve members of both [...]

I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby supporters have raised more than $2 million for his legal defense in the CIA leak case since last fall, according to Barbara Comstock, a member of Libby's defense team. Supporters of Vice President Cheney's former aide have hosted several fundraisers, including one Tuesday evening, hosted by former Cheney spokeswoman Mary Matalin [...]

Canada must do more to protect citizens' personal information from foreign governments, the national privacy commissioner said in a report to Parliament presented Tuesday. Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart singled out the Canadian Border Services Agency for allowing guards and customs agents to give their US counterparts private information over the phone, even though agreements between the [...]

The federal judge presiding over the Miami trial of terror suspect Jose Padilla has ordered prosecutors to turn over more evidence regarding their allegations that Padilla and his co-defendants conspired to kill, injure or kidnap US nationals overseas as part of a global terrorist network. US District Judge Marcia Cooke said that the indictment against [...]

A Syrian writer and his son have been charged with insulting government employees and will be tried before a military tribunal, the Syrian National Organization for Human Rights said Tuesday, as a crackdown on dissent in Syria continues. Journalist Ali Al-Abdallah and his son Mohamed are members of the state-recognized Atassi Forum for National Dialogue, [...]

A civil rights group has sued the state of Georgia , arguing that a new law designed to protect children from sex crimes all but forbids convicted offenders from living in urban and suburban areas. The Southern Center for Human Rights (SCHR) filed a complaint on Tuesday in the US District Court for the Northern [...]

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday filed a motion in support of Verizon's petition to consolidate over 20 cases in which the company must defend allegations that it illegally shared customer phone records with the National Security Agency in conjunction with the NSA's domestic spying program . The DOJ motion invokes national security [...]

Cuba and the United States exchanged barbs Tuesday over the US human rights record on the second day of the inaugural session of the UN Human Rights Council official website; JURIST news archive] in Geneva, Switzerland. Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Rogue accused the US of running a "concentration camp" at the US detention center [...]

For the first time in 20 years, a former government official is on trial for crimes committed during the Dirty War in Argentina . The trial of Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz , former chief investigator of the Buenos Aires province police, began Tuesday in La Plata, with the defendant refusing to testify. Etchecolatz told a panel [...]

In an effort to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the suicide of three Guantanamo Bay detainees , the Center for Constitutional Rights filed an Emergency Motion for Preservation of Evidence in federal court late Monday on behalf of the father of detainee Salah Ali Abdullah Al-Salami. The motion asks the district court in Washington, [...]