EU Enlargement Commissioner Gunther Verheugen has warned Turkey not to pursue legislation currently before the Turkish Parliament that would recriminalize adultery. Adultery had been struck down as a punishable crime by the Turkish Constitutional Court eight years ago as unfairly punishing women more than men. A criminal law reform bill before the Turkish Parliament last [...]

Responding to a lawsuit filed Friday in New York by survivors of the December 26 tsunami, a spokesman for the Thailand Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that his country rejected any legal liability arising from the disaster. "Thailand and its government agencies did not fail to perform their duties…The disaster was a force majeure that could [...]

A US military spokesman has told the Associated Press that the US may pull its security detainees out of Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison due to the high number of insurgent attacks against the facility. The high-security prison, already notorious during the rule of Saddam Hussein, became additionally infamous in 2003 when evidence emerged of US [...]

Documents from investigations of alleged Iraqi prisoner abuses released by the US Army last week pursuant to an ACLU FOIA suit and made public Monday include a report on a army sergeant who after reporting abuses of Iraqi prisoners by US personnel was ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination and later sent out of Iraq [...]

AP is reporting that Kosovo prime minister Ramush Haradinaj has resigned after being indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague. The indictment, anticipated yesterday but still not formally announced by the court, is in connection with Haradinaj's activities as a senior Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) guerilla [...]

Updating a JURIST report from earlier today, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Monday urged the Security Council in a closed-door emergency session to pass a resolution to end what he called "appalling" crimes in Sudan's Darfur region and called for sanctions against those preventing peace in the troubled area. He praised existing humanitarian and security measures, [...]

The US Department of Defense Monday confirmed the release and transfer to France of three French detainees in Guantanamo Bay to France "for prosecution". Mustaq Ali Patel, Ridouane Khalid and Khaled Ben Mustafa were the last three French detainees held at Gitmo following the release of four other French suspects last July. The former detainees [...]

A military judge in Foot Hood, Texas, has refused to dismiss any remaining charges against US Army Spc. Sabrina Harman in connection with 2003 abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison , setting the stage for a full court-martial trial scheduled for May 12. Harman will be the second Abu Ghraib soldier to [...]

In an interview with three news agencies Monday, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales denied renewed allegations that pursuant to an executive order issued after the September 11 attacks the CIA had flown as many as 150 terror suspects to foreign jurisdictions where they would be tortured. The New York Times published a story containing the [...]

The Special Court for Sierra Leone opened its final scheduled trial in Freetown Monday as outgoing chief prosecutor David Crane outlined his case against three former members of the the country's military junta – Alex Tamba Brima, Brima Bazzy Kamara and Santigie Borbor Kanu. The leaders of the of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council who [...]