Less than a year before Germany takes over the European Union presidency in January 2007, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said again Thursday that she plans to revive the European constitution , on hold since major referendum setbacks in France and the Netherlands last year. Merkel told members of the German Bundestag in a major policy [...]

UK Home Secretary John Reid said Thursday that the government will appeal a Wednesday High Court decision to grant asylum to nine Afghans convicted of hijacking a plane to the UK in 2002, allowing them to remain in the United Kingdom rather than be deported to Afghanistan. Mr. Justice Jeremy Sullivan based his ruling on [...]

A committee of the American Bar Association has voted unanimously that judicial nominee Michael B. Wallace is "not qualified" to sit on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit . Wallace, a Mississippi lawyer and former aide to US Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) , has garnered criticism from Democrats and the NAACP among [...]

The US Department of Justice has ended the internal investigation into the role its lawyers played in the NSA's domestic surveillance program approved by President Bush. The investigation had been headed by the Office of Professional Responsibility until department head H. Marshall Jarrett revealed this week that it had been "unable to make meaningful progress" [...]

Former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling face an uphill battle after Judge Simeon T. Lake III agreed with prosecutors in the Enron trial Wednesday that jurors should be allowed to find both men guilty because of "deliberate ignorance" or the so-called "ostrich defense" with respect to conspiracy and fraud that contributed to Enron's [...]

The Constitutional Court of Colombia has handed down a decision legalizing exceptions to the country's abortion ban in cases of rape, incest and if the life of the mother or fetus is in danger. Before Wednesday's ruling, women undergoing an abortion procedure and doctors performing the procedure could be criminally charged and sentenced to jail [...]

An Indonesian government official said Thursday that corruption charges against former dictator General Suharto are expected to be dropped despite criticism from human rights groups, including the Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation , which has been outspoken in the pursuit of action against the former dictator. Suharto, 84, who has suffered a series of strokes and [...]

The National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting phone records from major telephone companies AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth to study the calling patterns of millions of Americans in an effort to detect terrorist activity, according to a report from USA Today on Thursday. Although the NSA is not recording or eavesdropping on telephone conversations, the [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Ron Dudai of the SOAS School of Law at the University of London (UK) says that the dubious US response to 9/11 has given Israel an excuse to engage in its own questionable practices, as reflected by a recent Israeli Supreme Court ruling endorsing the detention of two Palestinians an "illegal combatants"… [...]

A Spanish High Court judge was forced to order the release of Moroccan citizen Saed El Harrak , a suspect alleged to be involved in the March 11, 2004 Madrid train bombings , due to the government's failure to apply for the necessary extension for further detainment. Harrak was arrested in connection to the bombings [...]