A suspected mastermind of the 2004 Madrid bombings appeared in an Italian court Tuesday for an initial hearing as his trial on terror charges begins. Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed , along with an alleged accomplice, faces charges of subversive association aimed at international terrorism, a new charge introduced in Italy following the Sept. 11 terror [...]

Gholamreza Aghazadeh, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran , said Tuesday that there is no legal basis for efforts to refer Iran to the UN Security Council . In an interview with the semi-official ISNA , Aghazadeh said that the five permanent members of the Security Council, who agreed Tuesday that the International [...]

JURIST Special Guest Columnist Craig Etcheson, author of After the Killing Fields: Lessons from the Cambodian Genocide (2005) and a Visiting Scholar at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, says the time has come for the United States to throw its full diplomatic weight behind the new Cambodia-UN Khmer Rouge Tribunal finally being [...]

Wire services are reporting that Coretta Scott King , wife of the late US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and a key figure in the civil rights movement herself, has died. She was 78, and had been hospitalized since August after suffering a stroke. After the assassination of her husband in 1968 she [...]

Leading Tuesday's international brief, the foreign ministers of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council have agreed to present the issue of Iran's nuclear enrichment program to the Council following a report by International Atomic Energy Agency due to be released in March. The move stops just short of a formal referral to [...]

Georgia Death Penalty Assessment Report, American Bar Association, January 30, 2006. Excerpt: Over the course of the past thirty years, the American Bar Association (ABA) has become increasingly concerned that there is a crisis in our country's death penalty system and that capital jurisdictions too often provide neither fairness nor accuracy. In response to this [...]

Michael J. Kelly : "Each new session of the Iraqi High Criminal Court, convened last year to try Saddam Hussein and his henchmen for the massacre of over a hundred Shi'a at Dujail in 1982, brings with it further evidence that the tribunal may simply not have the capacity to bring off a successful prosecution. [...]

The European Court of Human Rights based in Strasbourg, France, has awarded a landmark compensation payment of 250,000 euros ($300,000) to Alexei Mikheyev, a 29 year old Russian citizen virtually crippled from the waist down as a result of torture by Russian police. The court found Russia in violation of Articles 3 and 13 of [...]

Second Periodic Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Human Rights Situation in Sudan, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, January 2006. Excerpt: Unfortunately, to date efforts to improve the human rights situation on the ground have fallen short of what the CPA and the Interim National Constitution envisaged for [...]

French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin announced Monday that the number of anti-Semitic and racist acts reported in France dropped significantly in 2005. Anti-Semitic acts (defined as violence or threats of violence) dropped 47 percent, while racist and xenophobic acts decreased by 22 percent. De Villepin noted the decreases while promising more measures to target [...]