French Judge Brigitte Raynaud has decided to open a formal investigation into accusations that French soldiers may have acted in complicity with Hutu militias who killed between 500,000 and 800,000 Tutsis during the 1994 Rwandan genocide . Several Rwandan survivors filed a lawsuit against the French government in February of this year, alleging that French [...]

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour has again cautioned the Uzbekistan government to observe fair-trial standards after Uzbek courts sentenced another 42 people to 12-20 years in prison during closed hearings Wednesday. Arbour, concerned that the latest trials may have been plagued by the same problems as previous trials , including inadequate counsel [...]

The United Kingdom and Lebanon have signed a memorandum of understanding that specifies that non-UK citizens deported from Britain to Lebanon will not be mistreated. According to a foreign office spokesperson in London, the agreement seeks to protect the human rights of any person deported to Lebanon through the courts and independent monitoring, and is [...]

Former Egyptian presidential challenger and Al-Ghad opposition party leader Ayman Nour was sentenced Saturday to five years in prison on charges that he forged signatures required for his name to be on presidential ballots. Nour's lawyer said "This is a political verdict that will be annulled by the appeal court." Nour, himself a lawyer, has [...]

National Security Agency technicians have been analyzing large volumes of phone and internet traffic information going through American telecomunications data hubs as part of the warrantless surveillance program authorized by President Bush to identify individuals having connections to Al Qaeda, according to officials quoted by the New York Times in a report published Saturday. The [...]

A spokesman for the Iraqi High Criminal Court (formerly the Iraqi Special Tribunal ) trying Saddam Hussein and seven co-defendants said Saturday that a Kurdish investigative judge for the tribunal had been targeted in an unsuccessful assassination attempt. Munir Hadad , one of 20 investigative judges, was going through a Baghdad neighborhood Friday in an [...]

An FBI official Friday confirmed a US News and World Report article claiming that since 9/11 the US government has been clandestinely monitoring radiation levels at over 100 Muslim locations in the Washington DC area – including mosques, businesses and honmes – in search of nuclear bombs. Monitoring had also been conducted in Chicago, Detroit, [...]

Samuel A. Alito to the US Solicitor General, Memo re: Forsyth v. Kleindienst, US Department of Justice, March 8, 1984 . Read the full text of the memo from the National Archives. Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

A body found in a canal in Brussels, Belgium, was identified on Friday as that of an indicted Rwandan ex-minister cooperating with the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) . Former Rwandan Commerce Minister Juvenal Uwilingiyimana was indicted by ICTR in June 2005 for conspiracy, incitement and murder in connection with its ongoing probe of [...]

An Italian judge issued European arrest warrants on Friday for the 22 CIA operatives accused of participating in the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003 . Milan prosecutor Armando Spataro said the warrants allowed for the arrest of those accused in any of the 25 European Union countries. Spataro has also filed a request [...]