CT v. Spellings, State of Connecticut, August 22, 2005 . Read the full text of the complaint here . Reported in JURIST's Paper Chase here.

Iranian political prisoner, dissident journalist Akbar Ganji , has ended the hunger strike he began on June 11 to protest the conditions of his confinement, his wife confirmed Monday. The confirmation follows an earlier announcement from the Iranian judiciary that Ganji had called off his protest. Ganji was sentenced in 2001 to six years in [...]

The Arab Regional Office of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has issued a report saying the Yemen judiciary system and employment in the country's monitoring and control bodies is "infested with corruption." The report points to problems with the "fragile" judiciary, including lack of coordination between the government and law implementation, ineffectiveness of the [...]

Statistics from a new US Department of Justice report, Suicide and Homicide in State Prisons and Local Jails , reveal that prisoner death rates for homicide, suicide and AIDS have declined substantially in corrections facilities since 1980. Homicide rates in state prisons dropped by more than 90 percent, from 54 per 100,000 in 1980 to [...]

As Israeli forces work Monday to wrap-up the Gaza pullout , Israeli police commander Hagai Dotan announced the arrest of three young extremists who had come to Netzarim, one of Gaza's first settlements, to disrupt the evacuation. The three were detained after being found with metal spikes, oil, barbed wire and paint. Though the forcible [...]

A Kyrgyz Foreign Ministry official announced Monday that Kyrgyzstan will not return refugees who fled Uzbekistan after an uprising in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan in May. Zafar Hakimov, director of the Foreign Ministry's migration service department, said that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees has granted asylum status to 439 of the 455 [...]

US officials have dropped their objections to Islam playing a role in Iraq's legal system, according to members of Iraq's constitutional committee . Shiite and Kurdish negotiators have said that US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad has proposed that the Iraqi constitution name Islam as "a primary source" of law, which would give clerics authority [...]

With just a few hours remaining before Monday's midnight deadline , drafters of the Iraqi constitution have settled some crucial issues, but are still struggling with the role that Islam should play in the nation's law, as well aa with questions of Shiite autonomy. A meeting of the Iraqi National Assembly is scheduled for Monday [...]

According to a report published Sunday in the Dallas Morning News , eligible black jurors were being excluded from Dallas County juries by prosecutors more than twice as frequently as whites were turned away as recently as 2002. Earlier this year the US Supreme Court overturned the 1986 murder conviction of a black man accused [...]

The US military announced Sunday that following a preliminary inquiry, the US Naval Criminal Investigations Service has been asked to launch a formal probe into the killing by US Marines of a relative of Iraq's UN ambassador during a June house raid. Engineering student Mohammed al-Sumaida'ie, the 21-year-old son of the first cousin of Ambassador [...]