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US and Russian presidents George Bush and Vladimir Putin will discuss the Upper Garabagh conflict in Bratislava, Slovakia in February, along with other issues, says US Assistant Secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs Elizabeth Jones. The two presidents will call for stepping up activity in resolving conflicts in the former Soviet Union countries, including the Garabagh problem, she said. (19-JAN-2005)

Iran’s judiciary has retreated from its threat to arrest the human rights lawyer and 2003 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi. In a rare acknowledgement of mistake, a spokesman for the judiciary referred to the summons quite simply as an error. First, it had not stated a reason, second, the Revolutionary court, before which she was requested to appear would not be the right one. (20-JAN-05)
  

Random House, among the biggest publishing houses in the US, has announced that it will publish Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi´s memoirs. Although there had been an embargo under a Treasury Department regulation on publishing books from nations embargoes by the US, a lawsuit filed late last year resulted in a revision to permit publications of books by individuals from those nations. (20-JAN-05)
 

Yesterday, Uganda´s constitutional court began hearing an unprecedented legal challenge to capital punishment from the country´s more than 400 death row inmates. -While this is surely important, I fear that Ugandan authorities may welcome this opportunity to draw attention away from far bigger human rights problems, especially in the north, says Niels Jacob Harbitz, HRH´s Project Manager for Central and East Africa. (20-JAN-05) 
 

Moscow court´s finding that Kommersant, Russia´s leading independent business daily, must pay millions in damages for a July article that described long lines of customers withdrawing money at a major bank. (18-JAN-05)
 

A member of staff at the Grozny branch of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Said-Khussein Deniyev, has been found in the Chechen Republic after going missing last Thursday. (18-JAN-05)
 
 

The jury of the Olof Palme Prize has awarded three Russian human rights activists in 2004 . The Prize will be given to the head of Helsinki Group in Moscow, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, the president of the Human Rights Institute, Sergei Kovalyov, and the reporter of the opposition Novaya Gazeta newspaper, Anna Politkovskaya. (18-JAN-05)
 

This article provides first-hand knowledge, from personal experience, of what it is like to be an inmate in a Burmese prison. Moe Aye, the author, was a political prisoner in Insein Prison from 1990-96. He is now the News Editor of the Democratic Voice of Burma (Republic of the Union of Myanmar), a Burmese radio station broadcasting uncensored news into Burma from Oslo. (18-JAN-04)
  

Anxiety has grown about the commencement of the trials of three high-profile war crimes indictees from the former military junta, the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), which seized power in a coup in 1997. The three, Tamba Alex Brima (alias Gullit), Santigie Kanu (aka Brigadier Five Five) and Ibrahim Bazzy Kamara, have spent more than a year in the custody of the war crimes court, waiting for a trial chamber to be set up before their prosecution commences. (18-JAN-05)
 

The African National Congress of South Africa (ANC) says Zimbabwe?s main opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) must be allowed to hold public meetings if this year?s parliamentary elections are to be declared free and fair. ANC secretary-general, Kgalema Motlanthe told journalists after the party?s national executive committee meeting that he was worried that the MDC still required permission from the police to hold public meetings. (18-JAN-05)
  

An estimated one million Rwandans, an eighth of the population, are expected to be tried in traditional “gacaca” village courts for alleged participation in the 1994 genocide. Domitilla Mukantaganzwa, Executive Secretary of the National Service of Gacaca Jurisdictions, said that trials in some areas might start next month, with proceedings beginning in the rest of the country in 2006. (18-JAN-05)
 

British playwright Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti has broken her silence to speak about the violent protests against her play Behzti, which caused outrage for its depiction of rape and murder in a Sikh temple. Index on Censorship reports (17-JAN-05)