In a letter sent to President Bush Monday, 17 Democrats from the US House of Representatives called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations that the National Security Agency conducted warrantless surveillance of US citizens in violation of the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act . The call for presidential [...]

Six law professors at Cambridge University have warned that an innocuous-sounding bill now going through Parliament would give UK government ministers the power to abolish jury trials, place citizens under house arrest, and rewrite the law on nationality and immigration, all without Parliamentary consent. In a letter published Sunday in the Times of London, the [...]

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has agreed to meet with opposition leaders to discuss constitutional reforms, after the parties threatened to boycott the April elections. Thaksin dissolved Parliament on February 24 in response to street protests calling for his removal and set general elections for April 2. One issue on the ballot will be whether [...]

A Serbian who may prove to be a key witness in the trial of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was arrested in Madrid for the murder of a human rights leader in Kosovo, Spanish police said Monday. Veselin Vukotic and two other men allegedly shot and killed Enver Hadri, an ethnic Albanian and advocate of [...]

Public hearings on the merits of a case alleging state-sponsored genocide by Serbia and Montenegro opened Monday at the Hague-based International Court of Justice . Proceedings technically began in March 1993, when Bosnia filed a claim alleging violations of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide against the former Yugoslavia during the [...]

US Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA) has begun circulating a draft version of a bill that would require the federal government to obtain permission before conducting domestic surveillance . The bill, which Specter first mentioned earlier this month , would mandate that the attorney general get a warrant from the special court created [...]

An Australian man plans to appeal his conviction for receiving money and a plane ticket from an Osama bin Laden associate, his lawyer said Monday. Joseph Terrence Thomas was found guilty by a jury over the weekend for receiving $3,500 from Khaled bin Attash , a senior al Qaeda member, after training with the terrorist [...]

Saddam Hussein has ended a hunger strike to protest his trial after fasting for 11 days, according to his chief lawyer Monday. Khalil Dulaimi met with his client for several hours over the weekend and learned that US prison officials stepped in, prompting Hussein to stop the hunger strike for health reasons. Dulaimi indicated that [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Heidi Kitrosser of the University of Minnesota School of Law says that White House arguments in defense of the NSA domestic surveillance program are pushing the limits of Presidential secrecy beyond proper constitutional bounds… Two of the most frequent and most apt criticisms made about the secret Presidential order authorizing spying by [...]

China will increase the number of public trials for death penalty appeals during the second half of 2006, a legal scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said Monday. Liu Renwen estimated that China executes approximately 8,000 people per year, giving the country the highest number of executions in the world. The Supreme Court [...]