ANKARA (AFP) - Turkey’s new government has submitted to Parliament a package of EU-oriented democracy reforms which has been watered down from its original version to exclude some arrangements on torture and the right to retrial, parliamentary sources said yesterday. The planned amendments, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, make it easier to prosecute police officers accused of torture, extend the rights of detainees and suspects, and ease restrictions on the press, civic groups and non-Muslim religious foundations. However, the government chose to not to scrap the 15-year statute of limitations for cases of torture, as was earlier intended. It also omitted from the package an article which would have allowed prisoners — under certain conditions — to ask for a retrial if the European Court of Human Rights spoke out against their sentences.

SARAJEVO (AFP) - The newly elected Parliament in the Muslim-Croat part of Bosnia held its inaugural session yesterday, where the 98 members elected nationalists to head them. Muhamed Ibrahimovic of the Muslim nationalist party of Democratic Action (SDA) was elected parliamentary speaker, while Josip Merdzo of the nationalist Croat Democratic Union (HDZ) was appointed his deputy. However, it was not clear whether the votes, which were supported both by the dominant parties and three smaller groupings, reflected future alliances in the Parliament.

The USA moved yesterday to close a loophole in its designation of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) as a “terrorist organization” by amending its records to add the group’s new name. The State Department added the PKK’s new name, the Congress for Freedom and Democracy in Kurdistan (KADEK), to the designation which imposes financial sanctions on the group in a notice published in the Federal Register, a government gazette. (AFP)

Slobodan Milosevic has refused to undergo psychiatric tests ordered by the judges trying the former Yugoslav president for war crimes, a tribunal spokesman said yesterday. “Milosevic has refused this psychiatric testing and we are not going to force him,” spokesman Jim Landale told AFP. In November, the trial judges ordered psychiatric tests to assess “the mental strain” that the trial, now in its ninth month, is putting on the 61-year-old Milosevic. (AFP)

The Parliament of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) fired the state public prosecutor yesterday for his “incompetent” handling of last year’s ethnic Albanian insurgency. Stavre Dzikov was the former nationalist government’s key player who carried out its hardline orders, including issuing numerous arrest warrants against leaders of former ethnic Albanian rebels. The Parliament, dominated by new pro-democracy Slav Macedonian deputies, voted 70-3 to oust Dzikov. (AP)