An Italian referendum scheduled for June 12-13 on whether to ease the country's restrictive laws concerning fertility treatment and stem cell research and to redefine the legal language that defines the beginning of life at conception seems likely to fail if the latest polls are correct. With the Catholic Church and conservative politicians urging people [...]

Uganda's Court of Appeals Friday dismissed an appeal by death row inmates to ban capital punishment in the country but did find that laws mandating the death penalty for certain crimes are unconstitutional and require Parliamentary amendment. In a unanimous decision, Justice Galdino Okello said the general death penalty was constitutional because it was "punishment [...]

Rwandan officials announced Friday they will not pursue criminal charges against fugitive Hutu rebels that were aged 14 or younger at the time of Rwanda's 1994 genocide . Children as young as 10 years old took part in the slaughter of about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus . About 10,000 Rwandan Hutu rebels of all [...]

Bosnian Serb President Dragan Cavic Friday denounced the brutal killing of six Bosnian Muslim youths by Serb paramilitaries recorded on video in Srebrenica in 1995 and shown on Serbian television after being introduced in evidence last week at the war crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic at The Hague. Cavic condemned the act saying, "Whoever committed [...]

A panel of three federal judges Thursday reaffirmed an earlier decision to reject a legal challenge to the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan , concluding the plan was consistent with federal law and the Constitution. In 2004, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas declared the plan constitutional and the decision was [...]

A father and son who were arrested in Lodi, California on charges of lying to the FBI about attending an al-Qaida terrorist training camp, are challenging the government for releasing 2 significantly different affidavits to the media and to the court. The details in the first affidavit sent to the news media mentioned potential terrorist [...]

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) Friday denounced the deportation of four Uzbek men from Kyrgyzstan and appealed to the Kyrgyz government to cease further deportation of asylum seekers until procedures determine if they are refugees according to the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 . The four men have been determined "criminals" by the Uzbek government [...]

Speaking in San Francisco Thursday, ACLU national executive director Anthony Romero criticized parts of the Patriot Act and urged judicial review and public scrutiny of any investigations into alleged terrorism. Romero, who was responding in part to a pitch for renewal made yesterday by President Bush , also cautioned against passing judgment too quickly in [...]

A lawyer for Saddam Hussein said in a BBC interview broadcast Friday that his legal team had not yet received any list of formal charges, despite the Iraqi government's statement that the former Iraqi president's Saddam Hussein's trial could begin within months . Issam Ghazzawi, a Jordanian, also said that the defense hasn't yet seen [...]

The US Senate confirmed Judges David McKeague and Richard Griffin to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit Thursday by 96-0 and 95-0 votes, respectively. The confirmations came the same day Senators approved former Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor's permanent appointment to the Eleventh Circuit. McKeague was appointed as a federal district judge [...]