Thailand's Election Commission (EC) has determined that the ruling Thai Rak Thai political party broke two election laws by paying groups to run candidates in the annulled April parliamentary elections in order to meet election requirements after the main opposition parties boycotted the vote, an Attorney General spokesperson told AFP Thursday. The EC ruled that [...]

If allowed to proceed, a lawsuit filed by an Oregon nonprofit organization challenging the NSA domestic surveillance program would impermissibly reveal state secrets, lawyers for the US Department of Justice (DOJ) argued at a Wednesday hearing in federal court. The DOJ filed a notice Monday with the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation (JPML) seeking to [...]

The US Senate Indian Affairs Committee led by Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) released its final report Thursday, saying that the connections between former lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Tom Delay aide Michael Scanlon in a scandal collecting millions of dollars from Indian tribes were "astonishing." The report added that tribes should beef up their own [...]

UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Manfred Nowak told an Austrian radio station Thursday that European countries could help bring about the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center by accepting some detainees into their judicial and penitentiary systems. Nowak has previously called on the US to close Guantanamo Bay due to documented human rights violations [...]

No evidence has surfaced to disprove the extraordinary rendition allegations of the German man who sued the US Central Intelligence Agency, a German prosecutor familiar with the evidence collected by the German government in the case said Thursday. Khalid El-Masri has said he was kidnapped in Macedonia in 2003 in an instance of extraordinary rendition [...]

The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the "fair report" privilege , a legal protection that allows journalists to report on legal allegations made during official proceedings, even if the allegations are false. Solaia Technology sued Specialty Publishing for defamation after Specialty's subsidiary Start Magazine (now Start-it Magazine) ran an article on a patent infringement [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said that Uzbekistan is cracking down on dissent under the pretext of law, alleging Wednesday that two human rights defenders sentenced to nine years in prison on extortion charges were arrested in a pattern of criminal arrests designed to stifle dissent. Eleven human rights defenders have been convicted so far [...]

US State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli has said that the trial of Saddam Hussein is fair and legitimate, despite the murder of a third defense lawyer Wednesday morning. In a press briefing Wednesday, Ereli stated: The trial of Saddam Hussein…an Iraqi-led process and something that the Iraqi Government and Iraqi people have devoted enormous [...]

Iran has received nearly universal condemnation for selecting Tehran Prosecutor-General Saeed Mortazavi to attend the inaugural meeting of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva as an observer. Mortazavi is widely suspected of being present in July 2003 when Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died from a blow to her head while in Mortazai's custody, and [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Wednesday that insurgents in Iraq have committed serious violations of international humanitarian law and pointed to the kidnapping of two US soldiers last week as another example of the war crimes that are committed in Iraq. The two soldiers were kidnapped south of Baghdad last week and after their bodies [...]