Leaders of Nepal's Maoist rebel insurgency on Sunday called for an interim constitution to be enacted before a special assembly gathers to draft a new charter. The Maoists and a seven-party alliance of opposition political parties joined forces in a number of pro-democracy protests last month which led to King Gyanedra reinstating parliament at the [...]

Serbian police launched a full scale search on Sunday for Bosnian war crimes fugitive Ratko Mladic but were unable to arrest the former Bosnian Serb army commander wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia on genocide charges. The European Union called off membership talks with Serbia last week over the country's failure [...]

US President George W. Bush said Sunday that closing the US detention facility at Guantanamo Bay is a possibility in the future depending on the US Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , which will determine the legality of military trials for Guantanamo detainees. The Court's decision on whether military commissions for foreign terror [...]

Israeli police on Sunday evicted a group of Jewish settlers squatting in a Palestinian house in the West Bank city of Hebron, a region where Jewish settlement is no longer allowed. Three settler families left peacefully, but police scuffled with two dozen teenagers who initially refused to leave the house. 19 settlers were arrested. This [...]

Opposition lawmakers in Thailand are planning lawsuits against the Thai Election Commission (EC) over last months troubled parliamentary election . Suthep Thuagsuban, secretary general of the Democrat Party , has said that he will file a criminal lawsuit against four EC members, alleging they violated election laws by helping members of certain political parties. The [...]

Iranian lawmakers have sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan threatening to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty , which it signed in 1968, if "the U.N. Secretary General and other members of the U.N. Security Council fail in their crucial responsibility to resolve differences peacefully." The letter was read aloud on state-run radio [...]

Smelt et al. v. Orange County California et al., United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, May 5, 2006 . Read the full text of the opinion . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Russian prosecutors said Saturday that they will appeal the acquittal of two Chechens accused of murdering American journalist Paul Klebnikov . Klebnikov, the editor of Forbes magazine's Russian edition, was in the process of investigating corruption in Russian business before his death in 2004 in Moscow. Prosecutor Dmitry Shokhin announced that he would appeal to [...]

Zimbabwe security officials have increased the use of torture in dealing with opponents of the government of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe , according to a report released Saturday by the Zimbabwe Human Rights Forum . The rights group says that 19 incidents of torture were reported during March, up from three reported in January and [...]

State lawmakers have expressed concern about possible problems expected to accompany the implementation of the REAL ID Act , fearing that they will not be able to comply with the law's requirements before a May 2008 deadline. The legislation, drafted after the Sept 11 attacks and designed to discourage illegal immigration, attempts to make it [...]