US District Judge Leonie Brinkema stunned courtroom observers Monday by calling a recess in the September 11 hijacking trial of Zacarias Moussaoui Monday after being informed that government lawyers had coached witnesses in the case. The government informed the court and defense over the weekend that a Transportion Security Administration attorney had improperly coached four [...]

Nigerian lawyers have begun a two-day boycott of the country's courts in protest at what they say is "failure of the government to comply with court orders and the violation of human rights." Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) President Lanke Odogiyon says that disregard for the rule of law in Nigeria is reminiscent of the country's [...]

Turkey has urged European countries to reexamine their religious defamation laws and ensure that they protect Muslims in the wake of the Muhammad cartoons controversy . At a weekend conference of EU foreign ministers in Austria, Turkish foreign minister Abdullah Gul echoed Muslim claims that European laws reflect a double standard insofar as they protect [...]

The Supreme Court of Indonesia has denied the appeal of pro-Indonesia militia leader Eurico Guterres for charges stemming from his involvement in massacres that occurred during the 1999 violence in East Timor , according to Jakarta's Metro TV Monday. Guterres, who was free while his appeal was heard, will now be sent to prison to [...]

Russian Foreign Ministry officials confirmed Monday that they had received a letter written by Slobodan Milosevic on March 8 complaining about his medical care while in prison at The Hague and pressed for Russian medical experts to participate in his post mortem. A Ministry spokesman said in a statement:In this handwritten letter Slobodan Milosevic speaks [...]

Eight people have been charged in Zimbabwe with plotting the assassination of President Robert Mugabe following the arrests of 15 suspects on Friday. Several members of the opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) were among those charged, including MP Giles Mutsekwa, although the MDC itself has denied any knowledge or involvement. In a Saturday [...]

A former Iraqi judge on trial with Saddam Hussein testified Monday in Baghdad that he sentenced 148 Shiites to death after a 1982 assassination attempt on the former dictator in the town of Dujail, but asserted that they were given a proper trial beforehand. Awad al-Bandar led the Revolutionary Court when the 148 were sentenced. [...]

JURIST Guest Columnist Neil Kinkopf of Georgia State University College of Law says that the broad interpretations of presidential power under statute being offered by defenders of the President's domestic surveillance program threaten to undercut the constitutional balance of power and even basic democratic values… The Bush Administration’s domestic surveillance program has been the subject [...]

The annual six-week meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva was suspended after just four minutes on Monday to give the 191 member governments of the UN General Assembly more time to debate and discuss a replacement body. The 53-member commission, supposed to be meeting for the last time, agreed Friday to [...]

A member of the elite Special Air Service special forces of the British Army who refused to return to Iraq and later left British military service said in an interview published in the UK Sunday that he resigned because he objected to the illegality of the war and its tactics, especially as conducted by US [...]