Small island nations have been one of history's consistent political losers. Precisely because they are so small, they lack the power to resist domination by larger powers.

After seizing the Marshall Islands from Japan during World War II, the United States proceeded to use the the islands as a site for over 100 atmospheric nuclear tests. Decades of litigation resulted in only paltry compensation for the disposessed islanders.

The British expelled thousands of Chagos islanders from their homeland in the 1960s to make way for a military base and recently refused them the right to return to their tiny island in the Indian Ocean. The grounds? It would be too expensive to relocate them.

Nowadays, it is through pollution and global warming that world powers most threaten small island nations. If current trends hold, many inhabited islands will be submerged completely due to rising sea levels. Assuming large states are unwilling to reverse this trend by implementing drastic pollution controls, we have to ask: Will they compensate islanders for eliminating their territories altogether, and how?

Mathias Risse, a political philosopher at Harvard, supports a radical proposition made by Anote Tong, president of the island nation of Kiribati:

[S]catter his people of about 100,000 through the nations of the world as rising sea levels swallow up their native island.

Risse justifies this solution by invoking the 17th-century ideas of Hugo Grotius, who argued that the Earth should be viewed as owned collectively by humanity. If we take this view, states are obligated to accept immigrants whose ownership rights have been infringed upon because their home territories no longer exist. This raises the further question: Are states that contribute more to global warming more obligated to accept the resulting refugees?

This is all abstract, normative philosophy that rests on a contestable assumption; Risse theorizes about about what governments should think and do rather than what they in reality do think and do. But these issues might end up in court. Such philosophical arguments would then play an important role in determining the fate of the many islanders soon-to-be made homeless by global warming.

Photo: TORSTEN BLACKWOOD/AFP/Getty Images, Wikipedia

FBI

I'll admit that the FBI has put together some very suggestive information about Bruce Ivins, the anthrax researcher who committed suicide last week. The key document is this one (pdf), an affadavit for a search warrant, in which Postal Inspector Thomas F. Dellafera informs us that Ivins was under suspicion for the following reasons:

(1) At the time of the attacks, he was the custodian of a large flask of highly purified anthrax spores that possess certain genetic mutations identical to the anthrax used in the attacks; (2) Ivins has been unable to give investigators an adequate explanation for his late night laboratory work hours around the time of both anthrax mailings; (3) Ivins has claimed that he was suffering serious mental health issues in the months preceding the attacks, and told a coworker that he had "incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times" and feared that he might not be able to control his behavior; (4) Ivins is believed to have submitted false samples of anthrax from his lab to the FBI for forensic analysis in order to mislead investigators; (5) at the time of the attacks, Ivins was under pressure at work to assist a private company that had lost its FDA approval to produce an anthrax vaccine the Army needed for U.S. troops, and which Ivins believed was essential for the anthrax program at USAMFUID; and (6) Ivins sent an email to [redacted] a few days before the anthrax attacks warning [redacted] that "Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas" and have "just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans," language similar to the anthrax letters warning "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX . . . DEATH TO AMERICA . . . DEATH TO ISRAEL."

I'd like to hear some scientific experts weigh in on #1, which is the only non-circumstantial piece of evidence here. The Feds have more damning stuff, too, such as this bit about the anthrax letters noted by the New York Times:

[S]earches of Dr. Ivins's home in Frederick, Md., turned up "hundreds" of similar letters that had not yet been sent to media outlets and members of Congress.

But here's something Bloomberg caught about Ivins's late-night work habits:

The spike in his evening hours began in mid-August, almost a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators said.

So, he was working on all this before 9/11? What's that all about?

AFP/Getty Images

Yesterday, a shorn and shaven Radovan Karadzic faced his first day in court at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The Karadzic arrest has been hailed as a pivotal turning point in Serbia's path to EU cooperation and accession. But although Karadzic was captured in Serbia, his crimes were in creating the ethnically divided state that is Bosnia. And in Bosnia today, the story remains less than comforting.

In a compelling call for a revitalization of international efforts in the still-fractured country, Paddy Ashdown, former head of the Office of the High Representative in Bosnia, explains:

Bosnia's predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, Karadzic's creation, has seen the vacuum where will and policy should be. Its premier, Milorad Dodik, is now aggressively reversing a decade of reforms. He has set up the parallel institutions and sent delegations to Montenegro to find out how they broke away….

Meanwhile, in European capitals the growing view goes like this. We invested 13 years of hard work and huge resource in Bosnia. Now it is stable and peaceful and we are rather tired. Kosovo has proved it is possible to divide a country. What matter if Bosnia becomes another Cyprus?…

This is folly of a very dangerous order. What happens to the Muslim populations who have moved back to Republika Srpska, even to Srebrenica, if they are handed back to an exclusively Serb-dominated regime? What happens to Bosnia's shining star, the multi-ethnic, markedly successful sub-entity of Brcko, hemmed in by Republika Srpska? Is it to be handed over, too? I do not believe Bosnia is likely to go back to conflict; most of its people are just too war-weary. But the one event that could change that calculation in favour of blood would be to return to the old Karadzic/Milosevic plan to divide Bosnia.

But minus those few returnees and that one "shining star," Bosnia is divided, functioning largely as two separate, ethnically split states. Yes, it's a sad fact -- one that U.N. peacekeepers allowed to materialize between 1992 and 1995, and one that any international efforts will be hard pressed to undo.

It's no wonder the celebration over Karadzic's arrest in Bosnia has been short-lived. For as Bosnian novelist Aleksandar Hemon concludes in an excellent NYT op-ed, "Justice is good, but a peaceful life would have been much better."

AFP/Getty Images

This week's arrest of the Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic has made headlines almost as big as those announcing the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic back in 2001. The shocking photos of Karadzic disguised as a bearded Dr. Dabic have painted the whole story ridiculous; statements from Brussels highlighting the arrest as a milestone trumpet the news that Serbia has really chosen a European future; and re-reported accounts from Bosnian Muslim victims have added an element of remorse for the fact that justice had not been brought sooner. But a lesser story today, that of Dinko Sakic, illustrates the long-term significance of Karadzic's overdue arrest.

Sakic, the last living commander of Jasenovac, the Croatian World War II concentration camp, died this week. Long after fleeing to Argentina, where he lived a rather vocal life in support of Croatian nationalism, Sakic was eventually tried and found guilty of killing thousands of Serbs and Jews -- but not until 1999, decades after his crimes were committed and years after those very crimes were used by Croat and Serb leaders alike to stir up nationalist fervor and inter-ethnic fear during the last bloody days of Yugoslavia.

Fortunately the losses at Srebrenica and Sarajevo will not go the way of Jasenovac, whose significance and death toll still remain in question. Thanks to the work of the ICTY, the former Yugoslavia's crimes of the 1990s have been investigated and documented in great detail, leaving far less room for future finger-pointing and fear-mongering. And with the EU promising future membership to all the countries of the Western Balkans, they'll need all regional stability they can get.

For more reflections what Karadzic's capture means, check out FP's interview with Richard Holbrooke, the man who did as much as anyone to bring peace to Bosnia. He's thrilled:

I got the news on a train from New York to Washington. I’ve rarely been so excited about any news event in a positive sense. The world gets so much bad news, and to bring this man to justice, this terrible man, ranks right up there with capturing Saddam Hussein.

STR/AFP/Getty Images

"We are not saying that the three war crimes indictees, Radovan Karadzic, Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic, are not in Serbia, but we cannot be 100 per cent sure that they are."

That's what Rasim Ljajic, the head of Serbia’s Council for Cooperation with The Hague Tribunal told reporters yesterday. Of course, Karadzic was captured that night right in Belgrade, where he has been practicing alternative medicine and even lecturing for years. The arrest seems to confirm what most observers had assumed all along, that Karadzic's arrest was being held up not by the difficulty of capturing him but by the lack of political will to do so. It's unclear whether handovers of Mladic and Hadzic will follow, but it's going to be a lot harder for Serbian authorities to plead ignorance now.

Some are describing today's developments as a triumph for the International Criminal Court, which is fair. But the bigger story is how effective a carrot the prospect of EU integration can be in the right circumstances. It was this carrot that largely swung the last Serbian elections (despite the outrage over Kosovo) in favor of the current pro-European government, making today's arrest possible.

The EU badly has badly needed a victory for a while now and this is a big one.

Update: Then again, perhaps it's all Barack Obama's doing.  

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Meet David Remes, a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling and pro bono attorney for 15 Yemenis held at Guantanamo. Since 2005, Remes, who is half Yemeni, has been a high-profile member of the legal team challenging captives' detention at Gitmo.

And now, click here -- if you dare -- to see Remes at a recent news conference where, for some inexplicable reason, he decided that dropping trou' was a good way to show the assembled press corps just what his clients have had to endure.

Just what comparison was he trying to draw? That his clients were made to stand around in their underwear? It's an utter mystery. But one enigma has been cleared up: He's not a boxers man.

SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images

FP contributor Doug Farah, who wrote the book on Viktor Bout, the world's most notorious arms dealer, has sources telling him that the Russians are offering the Thais (who are holding Bout pending extradition to the United States) just about anything to prevent Bout from being shipped off to trial in America:

After several diplomatic efforts to get Bout out of prison and back to Russia, the Russian government, or at least its military establishment, has decided to let some money and hardware do the talking.

My sources tell me the Russian ambassador in Thailand has met several times with the Thai prime minister, and has offered sweet heart deals on weapons systems, including fighter jets, in exchange for Bout.

In addition, the Russians are offering sweet heart gas and oil deals to sweeten the pot...The question is, why would Bout be so valuable to the Russians, and what is it that they fear he could or would say in a court?

The most obvious answer is that he is deeply in bed and protected by the Russian military establishment and its intelligence services.

What's curious about this situation is the fact that it seemed likely at the time of Bout's arrest in March that there was no way the Thais (and by extension, the Americans) could have gotten their hands on such a prized prisoner unless the Russians had given the go-ahead. Bout allegedly lived openly in Moscow, and if his connections to the Russian intelligence agencies are as strong as many believe, there's reason to believe that someone might have sacrificed him for other (higher) purposes. That said, this could be a case of luck and old-fashioned investigative work coming together and resulting in a major nab, in which case the Russians want him back, not least because of the fear he'll talk. As with all things Bout, this situation is as murky as they come.

U.S. Navy/Getty Images

Kudos to the Washington Post for looking into the mysterious behavior of the Yemeni government toward the guys implicated in the USS Cole bombing. As Newsweek reported last fall, Yemen even briefly let Jamal al-Badawi, the al Qaeda planner in charge of the operation, out of prison. All told, "all the defendants convicted in the attack have escaped from prison or been freed by Yemeni officials," according to the Post.

The Yemenis defend their actions, saying they have their own special approach to fighting terrorism. A few years, ago, some in the West were even seeing it as a model. But the Post article calls Yemen's terrorist rehabilitation program into question with this devastating quote:

Hamoud al-Hitar, a former Supreme Court justice... suggested that the government had turned lenient because the Cole defendants had participated in a "dialogue and reconciliation program" designed to de-radicalize al-Qaeda members.

Hitar, who oversees the program, claimed that 98 percent of graduates have remained nonviolent. Asked about two Cole suspects who escaped and went to Iraq to become suicide bombers, Hitar shrugged. "Iraq was not part of the dialogue program," he said.

Last week, Australia's government announced that it will formally apologize for its decades-long practice of stealing Aboriginal children and giving them to white families to raise. The practice, intented to destroy "Aboriginality" and force racial assimilation, was official government policy from 1915 to 1969. During these years, many children were raised in poor conditions in institutions, received little to no education, and suffered abuse at the hands of caretakers. Apologizing for it is an admirable step by the new Australian administration to move forward from a dark past. Australia aside, though, there has been a real lack of sincerity on the international apology front lately.

Over the past year, some in the U.S. Congress have attempted to force apologies from other nations on two occasions. First, the House of Representatives passed a resolution urging Japan to apologize for forcing thousands of women into sex-slavery during WWII. More recently, the House attempted a vote condemning Turkey for its treatment of Armenians at the beginning of the 20th century. And while I by no means wish to diminish these atrocities, I wonder: Would an apology elicited under pressure really contribute to the healing process?

Tareq al Hashemi (ALI AL-SAADI/AFP/Getty Images)

Consider the case of Iraq. This past Sunday, controversial legislation to reintegrate former Baathists back into Iraqi government became law. It was one of the key "benchmarks" the U.S. Congress has been using to judge the Iraqis' progress. As Feisel al-Istrabadi, Iraq's former deputy ambassador to the U.N., pointed out in a recent Seven Questions interview, de-Baathification had gone horribly awry. The question, though, is not whether reconciliation is warranted, but whether it is real and sustainable given how the bill came about—under U.S. pressure. Can reconciliation be treated like just another benchmark? Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a top Sunni leader and influential member of the Presidential Council, certainly doesn't think so.

If you're a man in the Banda district of India who beats your wife, demands more dowry, or otherwise mistreats women, you'd better watch out. A posse of vigilante women clad in pink saris may soon come after you, and it's going to be ugly.

The "Gulabi Gang" (Pink Gang) uses sticks (lathis) and cricket bats to "teach erring men a lesson." In one instance, they chased a woman's abusive, alcoholic husband into a sugarcane field and sorely thrashed him. They also go after corrupt government officials. Last year, they stormed a police station after cops refused to register the case of a low-caste man simply because of his social standing.

This area of India, in the state of Uttar Pradesh (the same state from which the late "bandit queen" Phoolan Devi hailed), is notorious for its ill-treatment of women and people of lower castes. Only 24 percent of women can read (compared with 50 percent of men), domestic violence is rampant, and there are just 846 females per 1,000 males (compared with the state's average of 879). Bonded labor (a.k.a. slavery) is common, lower-caste children face open discrimination at school, and government officials are corrupt.

Given these circumstances, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. Gulabi Gang founder Sampat Pal Devi, who was married off at age 9 and had her first child at 13, says:

Nobody comes to our help in these parts. The officials and police are corrupt and anti-poor. So sometimes we have to take the law into our own hands. At other times, we prefer to shame the wrongdoers. But we're not a gang in the usual sense of the term. We're a gang for justice.

Until the rule of law can be established, it looks like justice will be have to administered via grrrl power.

PIERRE ANDRIEU/AFP/Getty Images

When you hear the word "Canadian," what's the first thing that comes to mind? Someone who is hockey-crazed? Someone who says "eh" at the end of every sentence? Someone who is, dare I say it, nice? 

How about someone who is black?  

Now, naturally there are plenty of black Canadians. There are black Canadians who like hockey, say "eh", and are nice. But this blog post isn't really about black Canadians or white Canadians or any kind of Canadian at all. It's about certain people in the United States who have appropriated the word "Canadian" as code for someone who is black.

Earlier this month, an e-mail that had been circulating since 2003, written by a Houston assistant district attorney Mike Trent, resurfaced. The e-mail was short, only about 100 words, and was sent to the entire office. It started out by praising a junior prosecutor for a job well done. Then the message continued:

He overcame a subversively good defense by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing."

If you're wondering why Canadians were on a Texas jury when only U.S. citizens are allowed to serve, well, there weren't any. Other members of the D.A.'s office who got the memo were wondering the same thing themselves. They looked at an online database of racial slurs and found that "Canadian" was a term used to mask more openly racist terms. Trent claims that he was unaware of the meaning, overheard someone saying that there were Canadians on the jury, took that literally, and just repeated it in his e-mail. 

There is just so much wrong with this situation on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin. So, you be the judge.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Someone please explain to me how this is supposed to be justice. A 23-year-old journalism student named Sayad Parwez Kambaksh supposedly goes online, finds an interesting paper, and prints it out. He supposedly brings it to class at Balkh University, discusses it with a teacher and some fellow students. The paper gets copied and distributed. Some students find it objectionable; they say it is offensive and that it insults Islam. They complain to the government.

Kambaksh is arrested in October and put in jail. He says he had nothing to do with the paper. His case goes to trial, but he has no lawyer. In fact, his family is not even aware that he's put on trial. A panel of three judges decides that he should be put to death because the paper he supposedly distributed "humiliates Islam." The Afghan Independent Journalists' Association reports that any paper in question may have downloaded from an Iranian blog, which contained articles questioning the origins of the Koran, among other controversial things.

Now, his case goes to the first of two appeal courts. But Fazel Wahab, the chief judge in the province where the trial took place, says that only President Hamid Karzai can pardon the student, since Kambaksh supposedly confessed to having violated tenets of Islam. Incidentally, Wahab has never read the paper (to be fair, he was also not on the panel that convicted Kambaksh). 

Kambaksh isn't the only Afghan journalist who's gotten into trouble with the law. Ghows Zalmai was also arrested three months ago, charged with distributing a translation of the Koran that clerics did not accept. Religious scholars have also called for him to be put to death.

At any rate, all of this raises the question: Why did the U.S. go into Afghanistan and topple the Taliban, only to have it be replaced with a system like this? So far, no comment from Karzai, who is attending the World Economic Forum in Davos. But he'd better step up.

AFP/Getty Images

So, British teacher Gillian Gibbons is going to a Sudanese jail for 15 days for insulting religion by allowing her class of primary school children to name a teddy bear "Mohammed." (Since she has already served five days, she only has 10 left.) Gibbons escaped a far harsher potential punishment. If she had been found guilty of all three charges levied against her (the others were inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs), she could have faced 40 lashes and six months in prison.  

British Foreign Secretary David Milband has already hauled the Sudanese ambassador into his office to express "in the strongest terms" his concern about her arrest. During their meeting, he also spoke on the phone to Sudan's acting foreign minister.

Will Prime Minister Gordon Brown also get involved? This case reminds me of the infamous Singapore case of 1994, when American teenager Michael Fay was sentenced to a fine and six lashes with a cane for vandalizing cars and stealing road signs. Two dozen U.S. senators wrote letters to Singapore asking for clemency. But it wasn't until after President Clinton complained to his counterpart in Singapore that Fay's sentence was reduced to four lashes. 

At the time, Singapore protested that the United States shouldn't get involved with its domestic affairs. So far, the case of the British schoolteacher hasn't touched on the always-touchy issue of sovereignty, but will it? And should it?

It seems to me that in both cases, there's been a fair, but not necessarily satisfactory, result. In the case of Michael Fay, the laws were clearly laid out, the punishment was defined, and the sentence enforced, albeit at a softer level due to diplomacy. In the case of Gillian Gibbons, the laws may not have been laid out as clearly, but given the tensions between Islam and the West, Gibbons should have perhaps been more sensitive about what can be given the name "Mohammed" and acted more cautiously. Forty lashes and six months in prison—to say nothing of being shot, which is what some in Khartoum are calling for—would have been outrageous for an innocent mistake. But the fact that the Sudanese courts sentenced her to a few days in jail, given the alternative, seems to be an acceptable compromise that shows a modicum of respect for Sudanese sovereignty. Better yet would be if they would just release her right now and end this farce.

This is the best news I've heard all week:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Taxicabs in the nation's capital will switch to meters from the current confusing zone system of calculating fares, the mayor announced Wednesday. [...]

Visitors and residents have grumbled for years about the lack of meters in district taxis, saying the zone system is confusing and vulnerable to cheating.

Before [Mayor] Fenty's announcement, the District was the only major U.S. city without taxi meters.

The decision to switch to meters or keep the current system was required by a provision inserted in legislation last year by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., a longtime critic of zones.

The map used for calculating fares consists of 22 zones radiating outward from the U.S. Capitol. Each time a zone boundary is crossed, the fare goes up a few dollars. Surcharges are added for stops, rush hour travel and extra riders. The base price for a ride within one zone -- whether it's a few blocks or a few miles -- is $6.50.

When I moved to Washington last December and got in my first taxi, I thought I was back in Cairo, where having to haggle over the fare is a daily source of frustration for foreigners and locals alike. Very few people in D.C. have figured out the arcane zone system, which makes it easy for taxi drivers to charge nearly any price they want. Now, they won't be able to get away with it anymore.

Mark Jordan, FP's D.C. correspondent, writes in with a dispatch from our nation's capital:

All Iraqis must have a voice in the new government, and all citizens must have their rights protected." That was George W. Bush, speaking on February 26, 2003.

On Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. Senate demonstrated its commitment to this bedrock democratic principle. Unbeknownst to most Americans, despite its larger population than the state of Wyoming, the 580,000-plus residents of Washington, D.C., are not represented by any voting member in Congress. Nevertheless, District residents are required to pay federal taxes and serve in the United States military. Three District residents have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Earlier this year, a bill that would provide Washington with a voting representative in Congress passed in the House. And Tuesday, Republican Senators—with the explicit encouragement of the Bush administration—blocked consideration of that legislation in the Senate, leaving over half a million Americans without a voice, and without their rights protected.

So much for leading by example.

I asked Brian Calvert, a reporter for Voice of America Khmer in Washington, to weigh in on today's news that a key lieutenant of the notorious Pol Pot had finally been taken into custody. Here's Brian's take:

The indictment and detention Wednesday of Nuon Chea, Pol Pot's chief lieutenant in the Khmer Rouge, for war crimes and crimes against humanity is the most significant action taken so far by a bedeviled tribunal that was established more than a year ago.

Whether or not his arrest will spell justice, and for whom, remains to be seen.

TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP

Nuon Chea, also known as Brother No. 2, was flown by helicopter Wednesday morning from his home in the mountains of northwest Cambodia and questioned in Phnom Penh, the capital, by judges of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the official name of the Khmer Rouge tribunal.

Nuon Chea has said he will happily face a trial. But it’s not because he regrets his actions. Rather, he sees a trial as a chance to exonerate his role in the Khmer Rouge, which called itself Democratic Kampuchea. In his view, Pol Pot’s regime was only defending the Cambodian people from Vietnamese agents and American bombs.

In reality, the Khmer Rouge used the fear of a Vietnamese takeover and of U.S. fighting in Indochina as fuel for their insurrection. After they took power, as many as 2 million people starved to death or were executed. The legacy of that regime and the civil strife that followed its ouster has been a war-battered people, a devastated infrastructure, and a country that still hasn't recovered.

Nuon Chea is widely believed to be a chief architect of the regime's murderous policies. According to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has been gathering evidence in Cambodia for potential trials for a decade, Nuon Chea held posts as deputy secretary of the Cambodian Communist Party's Central Committee and as a member of the Party's Standing Committee, the bodies most responsible for policies of the regime.

TANG CHHIN SOTHY/AFP

Given Cambodia’s bloody history, it may be hard for many to imagine why it has been so difficult to bring Khmer Rouge figures like Nuon Chea to justice. The joint tribunal has struggled since its inception, hamstrung by bickering among U.N.-appointed international jurists and their Cambodian counterparts. Nuon Chea is only the second man to be taken into court custody. Since July, the courts have been holding Kaing Guek Eav, better known by his revolutionary name, Duch, the head of S-21, Cambodia's infamous torture center. Also known as Tuol Sleng, it's now a genocide museum for tourists.

The courts are investigating at least three more suspects for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but their names have not been released.

Will there be justice for the Khmer Rouge's victims? We just don't know. The U.S. Ambassador to Cambodia, Joseph Mussomeli, recently told VOA Khmer that over the next one or two years, "we'll have at least, I would guess, somewhere around a dozen people being brought up on charges of genocide."

"There were hundreds of people who were guilty of genocide, but, frankly, you have to draw the line somewhere," he added. "You can't have the trial last for 20 years or 30 years, you can't spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the trial, but you have to find at least the most responsible for genocide and bring them to trial, and I think we are now on the way to doing that."

We'll know soon enough if he is right.

GREG WOOD/AFP/Getty

Mohamed Haneef, the Indian doctor who was detained for 25 days in Brisbane for allegedly providing "reckless support" in the recent London terrorist bombing attempts, may soon be able to return to Australia after leaving the country for India when his work visa was revoked. Australia's hardline immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, canceled Haneef's work visa because he found Haneef's character to be suspicious—though the Australian Federal Police ultimately dropped charges against him. The chief prosecutor admitted "a mistake has been made." Yet Andrews apparently has no regrets about his decision.

Now, the Australian Federal Court, the second highest court in Australia below the High Court,  has ruled that Andrews decision was, in fact, legally wrong: The visa was wrongfully revoked and should be reinstated. Justice Jeffrey Spender found that Andrews made a "jurisdictional error," and that the "alliance" between Haneef and UK terror suspects Kafeel and Sabeel Ahmed were not sufficiently strong. Haneef simply left his cell phone's SIM card with his second cousins, who were implicated in the case. Police initially believed it was found in the burning car in Glasgow, but it was actually found 185 miles from the city in his cousin's flat.

But the Federal Court's decision is unlikely to deter Andrews from seeking to prevent Haneef from returning from Bangalore to his job on the Gold Coast. He's already signaled the possibility that he will challenge the Court's decision, with Australian Prime Minister John Howard adding, "We haven't heard the last of this because the government's appealing." In such a politicized case in the lead up to Australia's election season, it's a relief that at least the courts can offer some hope for a fair outcome.

AAMIR QURESHI/AFP/Getty Images

Islamabad, PAKISTAN: Pakistani lawyers celebrate the reinstatement of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry by offering sweets to each other outside the Supreme Court building in Islamabad, 20 July 2007.

In May 2009, Japan will adopt a jury-style system to settle criminal cases—the first time since 1943. But rather than feeling empowered by the prospect of participating directly in Japan's traditionally opaque justice system, 80 percent of Japanese are dreading the change and do not want to serve as jurors.

In the 500 mock trials that have been held across the country to help people get used to the idea of serving on juries, most participants have been left feeling stressed and overwhelmed. Robert Precht, an American defense lawyer who has been advising the Japanese on how the American jury system works, is concerned about how the Japanese will react to the new system:

I think people are seriously going to start panicking next year, as citizens actually face the very real possibility of being summoned, and then have to go into this very strange environment, speak in front of authority figures and actually be questioned about their own opinions. And I'm concerned that's going to freak people out."

Japanese jurors will actually sit on the bench next to judges and decide cases with them, in contrast to the U.S. system where juries are separated from judges. In a culture where "to not speak is considered a virtue" and respect for authority is deeply valued, this change will clearly take a great deal of getting used to. But given Japan's 99.8 percent criminal conviction rate, which is widely seen as the result of forced confessions, any change toward greater transparency is probably a good thing.

BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images

Monday marked the start of the murder trial of Hrant Dink, the editor of a Turkish-Armenian newspaper who was shot in broad daylight outside his Istanbul office in January.

Dink's writings on the Armenian genocide had made him a target for both the Turkish government and ultra-nationalist groups. His assassination by an angry 17-year-old six months ago sparked something remarkable in the Turkish public: Thousands gathered to express solidarity with the Armenian minority and outrage against restrictions on free speech and growing ultra-nationalist sentiment. And for a fleeting second, the government seemed dedicated to real reform and perhaps even the eventual abolishment of Article 301, which was used to try to silence Dink and other famed writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Shafak for allegedly "insulting Turkishness."

But when it finally comes time for justice to be served for Dink, things get messy. The trial, which will take place behind closed doors since the main defendant is a minor, is already attracting heavy scrutiny. Human Rights Watch warned recently that evidence presented at the trial may raise questions about possible collusion or negligence on the part of security forces. The real test for the Turkish judiciary will be if it can adequately prosecute all those involved—even if this means lifting the huge rock off some dirty internal dealings. In an article in the New York Times, Fethiye Cetin, the Dink family's lawyer, expressed his concern:

The gang does not consist of these suspects only," Ms. Cetin said of the 18 defendants, according to the news agency. "It is far more planned and organized. There is almost an intentional misconduct of the gendarmerie and police in this incident."

Ensuring that all those involved in Dink's murder are exposed and punished is essential not just for his family, but for Turkey as a country. I'm pretty sure the folks in Brussels will be following this case closely. After all, the last thing Turkey needs is another excuse for Europe to slam the door shut on Turkish membership.