Belgian lawmakers pass burka ban, from BBC Belgium’s lower house of parliament has voted for a law that would ban women from wearing the full Islamic face veil in public. The law would ban any clothing that obscures the identity of the wearer in places like parks and on the street. No-one voted against it. The law

"Before we succumb to the oracles of doom, we should formulate a new scientific law: small fluctuations in scientific data produce disproportionate panic in the populace. Climate scares have become like health scares: there is a new one almost every week, and they get less persuasive as they multiply. " So writes Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, in the Independent on Sunday of all places, speculating abo...

Finally overcoming months of political deadlock, Iraq's Parliament overwhelmingly approved a provincial election law on Wednesday. Iraq's presidential council vetoed a previous version of the law in July, which Parliament passed after a walkout by Kurdish lawmakers. Debate over the law had been plagued by a complex dispute between Arabs and Kurds over the sharing of power between ethnic ...

On Wednesday, Iraq's presidential council vetoed a controversial election law, sending it back to parliament for revision and casting doubt on provincial elections that were initially planned for October 1, 2008. Iraq's parliament passed the election law Tuesday despite the walkout of Kurdish lawmakers angered over language regarding the disputed city of Kirkuk. The law would have allocated an equ...

In some nightmares and some dreams the European Union may be a super-power or even a super-state, but its feet are firmly stuck in public international law. States are members, treaties form the foundations, the European Communities are international organisations and diplomatic relations are maintained inside and out. *** Diplomatic relations Do you want to experience the public international law...

Slovakia's parliament approved on 5 November a widely-criticised law which protects so-called strategic companies from bankruptcy by giving the government the option to buy, restructure and find new investors for a firm.

Anyone who’s passionate about science, as I am, cannot help but be seriously concerned by the growing extent to which anti-scientific ideas, and the groups and organisations that promote them, are increasingly creeping into public life and attracting mainstream political support. While it’s easy to ridicule the purveyors of anti-scientific ideas when they’re to be found

A member of parliament said lawmakers were more likely to agree on amendments for the existing election law than to agree on a whole new legislation.MP Wa'ail Abdul-Latif, who is also a judge, explained that there is simply not enough time to draft and pass a new election law to replace the existing one that has been in use since 2005. The parliament has to meet a mid-November deadline for

Direct elections to the European Parliament were a decisive victory for European citizens in 1976, with the first directly elected EP in action since 1979. But attempts to enact a uniform election procedure have failed miserably. So has the European Parliament in informing the public, if I did not miss something. I failed to find any relevant information about the common principles or the duties a...

One of the most important aspects of the rule of law is that we are all entitled to use the law to our best advantage. The most obvious example of this is probably tax law in which there is a clear difference between minimising your tax liability by taking advantages of exemptions allowed by law (known as tax avoidance) and simply fiddling the figures thereby not paying tax that is due by law (tax...