The president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia has directed the court's Trial Chamber to consider varying or lifting protective measures applied to certain materials in the case against former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in order to assist Dutch authorities and the Tribunal's own team investigating the circumstances of Milosevic's death. Tribunal [...]

Saddam Hussein formally testified in his own defense for the first time Wednesday at his trial in Iraq, calling the Iraqi High Criminal Court a "comedy" before the hearing was closed to the public. Chief Judge Ra'uf Rasheed Abdel-Rahman closed the courtroom after Hussein called on Iraqis to put an end to sectarian violence and [...]

Acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Wednesday that Israel plans to put a group of Palestinian prisoners on trial for the 2001 killing of an Israeli tourism minister. The men were seized after Israeli forces stormed a Palestinian prison in the West Bank Tuesday. Olmert vowed that the men will be "indicted according to [...]

More than 1,500 US federal judges have requested government-paid home security systems approved by Congress last year, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday. After a man broke into the home of District Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow and murdered her husband and mother last March, the Judicial Conference of the United States , the policymaking board [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Shane of Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, says that the Bush Administration’s proposed Line-Item Veto Act has only two problems: first, it proposes to create power the President pretty much already has, and second, it is not a line-item veto… Perhaps this kind of misrepresentation matters only to constitutional [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Faris Sanabani, Publisher of the English-language Yemen Observer newspaper currently facing calls by Yemeni prosecutors for permanent shutdown, confiscation, and even the death penalty against its Chief Editor for republishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, explains why – and how – his paper reprinted the Danish cartoons, and tells the remarkable [...]

Almost 300 photographs and 19 videos showing abuse at Abu Ghraib prison have been published by Salon.com , in what Salon says is the entire archive of Army photographic materials related to abuse at the Iraqi prison. The photos published Tuesday date back to late 2003 and include a picture of a naked Iraqi prisoner [...]

The Italian lawyer for former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz has requested that Aziz be moved to Bakulev Heart Surgery Center in Moscow for heart treatment. Aziz is currently being held by US forces in Baghdad pending possible trial by the Iraqi High Criminal Court now trying Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants. The request [...]

A witness at the court-martial of Abu Ghraib dog handler Sgt. Michael J. Smith told a military jury Tuesday that he saw Smith using his black Belgian shepherd to terrify two teenage detainees in the area of the prison reserved for women and juveniles and later heard him claim that he and another canine team [...]

UN officials from the Office of Administration of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal are urging the timely start of the genocide trial of aging Khmer Rouge leaders, noting the weekend death of Slobodan Milosevic in the fifth year of his high-profile war crimes trial at The Hague. The communist Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths [...]