Malawi Vice President Cassim Chilumpha has been released on bail but placed under house arrest three weeks after police arrested him in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika . After being released Monday, Chilumpha proclaimed his innocence on the treason charges, saying that he angered the government by refusing [...]

Judges from Thailand's Supreme Court, Constitutional Court, and Administrative Court on Tuesday rejected the October 22 date set by the Election Commission for new parliamentary elections and again demanded that the Commission resign after organizing last month's failed parliamentary elections . One justice said the recent Commission meeting where the October date was proposed was [...]

Defense witnesses began testifying Tuesday in the trial of Saddam Hussein , following Monday's reading of formal charges against the deposed Iraqi leader and seven co-defendants for murder, torture, and the illegal arrests of 399 people in Dujail as part of a crackdown in the town after an assassination attempt on Hussein's life. Witnesses, who [...]

Dutch MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali , who was born in Somalia, resigned her office Tuesday and announced that she will leave the Netherlands in response to the controversy surrounding her naturalization. Ali admitted lying on her 1992 asylum application during her confirmation proceedings for parliament in 2002, but recent reports surfaced about the discrepancies and [...]

New York City has filed a lawsuit against 15 rogue out-of-state gun dealers in an attempt to stymie the influx of weapons into New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday. The suit, which was filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York , seeks to compel the dealers to undergo [...]

A Russian judge on Tuesday said that Nurpashi Kulayev participated in the September 2004 Beslan school siege , committing an act of terrorism, but has not yet issued a final verdict on Kulayev's guilt. Kulayev, who is the sole surviving attacker from the siege, pleaded not guilty to terrorism and murder charges, denied killing anyone [...]

Federal Communications Commission chief Michael J. Copps said Monday that the agency should investigate the access to domestic customers' phone records allegedly granted to the National Security Agency (NSA) by telecommunications giants Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth . Reacting to reports that the companies complied with NSA requests to look at the records, Copps said that [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Chandra Lekha Sriram, Chair of Human Rights at the University of East London School of Law (UK), says that the UK government's push to limit the application of the Human Rights Act in matters of public safety is politically dubious and legally unjustifiable… When it was revealed that the US program of [...]

The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights has claimed in a new report that Russia is maintaining secret prisons in Chechnya and is using them for kidnapping and torturing separatist Chechens in violation of European and Russian laws. The group submitted the report to Dick Marty , the Chairperson of the Committee on Legal Affairs [...]

President Bush has imposed a US travel ban on Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko and his associates. In a proclamation released Monday, Bush cited election fraud, corruption and human rights violations as reasons for the ban, saying that its targets are those who "undermine or injure democratic institutions or impede the transition to democracy in Belarus." [...]