But, in a blunt demonstration of who is in charge in the tense zone around South Ossetia, Russian soldiers turned back a United Nations convoy. And the Georgian government said Russia reinforced its positions on the outskirts of the Black Sea port city of Poti over the weekend.

The World Court case opened a new legal front in the battle between Georgia and Russia for control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and began as French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrived in Moscow with a European Union delegation for talks aimed at easing the standoff.

But Russia's Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said Monday just before the EU delegation sat down for talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that Moscow was against an autonomous EU monitoring mission.

He said such a force would lead to unnecessary "fragmentation" of international monitoring efforts by the U.N. and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

Sanjeev Nanda, 30, faces up to 10 years in jail on manslaughter charges, according to his attorney, Ramesh Gupta. Judge Vinod Kumar was expected to announce the sentence Wednesday, along with those of three other defendants who were convicted of destroying evidence.

Nanda is the son of arms dealer Suresh Nanda and a grandson of India's former naval chief, S. M. Nanda.

The high-profile case has been seen as a test of whether India's judicial system, which has a long history of favoring the well-connected, is willing to hold the wealthy accountable.

Many saw the ruling as an encouraging sign that India's two-tiered justice system was becoming a thing of the past.

"The fact that justice has prevailed will give some hope that the powerful can't get away with manipulating the system," said Ved Marwah, a retired police commissioner.

Prosecutors said Nanda and two of his friends were returning from a party at 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 10, 1999 when their BMW, speeding at roughly 85 miles per hour (135 kilometers per hour), crashed into seven people standing along an empty street. A witness reportedly saw the men stop, examine the damage to their car, then speed off. The victims, three policemen and three laborers, died.

Nanda and two friends who were with him in the car, Siddharta Gupta and Manik Kapoor, were classmates at an elite New Delhi private school. Nanda was home for the holidays from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.

Mexico City is one of the few places in Latin America that allows abortion without limitations in the first trimester, although abortion rights groups complain most doctors still refuse to do the procedure.

Within minutes of the 8-3 vote in favor of the law, abortion rights groups were thinking of ways to expand the decision to other parts of Mexico and even Latin America, where abortion is virtually unheard of.

"It opens the road for all of Latin America to start visualizing legal paths to abortion," said Raffaella Schiavon, who directs the international abortion rights group Ipas and has been advising the city government.

Mexico City officials said they were preparing to help other local governments in the region interested in approving similar laws.

Elsewhere in Mexico, abortion is allowed only in cases of rape, when the mother's life is in danger or if the fetus has severe deformities. That is standard across Latin America, where only Cuba and Guyana allow abortions without restrictions in the first trimester. Nicaragua banned abortion in all cases in 2006.

Anti-abortion groups were mobilizing to fight other local attempts to legalize abortion.

The demonstrators, from the right-wing People's Alliance for Democracy, stopped once they entered the compound at Government House at about 2:30 p.m. and did not attempt to enter the official offices there, footage on Thai TV channel 9 showed.

Earlier, mobs of alliance protesters took over a state-controlled television station and besieged several ministries in a self-described "final showdown" to try to bring down the elected government of Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej.

It was the first time in recent years that a large crowd managed to get onto the Government House grounds. The crowd of several thousand appeared peaceful.

Samak was expected to speak about the situation late Tuesday afternoon.

The protests were the latest effort by the alliance to force Samak's government from office. The group contends Samak is a proxy for former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was ousted in a 2006 coup and now has gone into self-imposed exile in England.

Khodorkovsky — the former head of Yukos oil company, and once Russia's richest man — was sentenced to prison for eight years in 2005 on charges of tax evasion and fraud in what Kremlin critics slammed as a flawed trial.

"Prisoner Khodorkovsky does not deserve conditional early release," Judge Igor Faliliyev said at the Ingodinsky regional court in the Siberian city of Chita, citing as reasons his refusal to take part in professional training in sewing while in prison, and an alleged misdemeanor dating back to October.

Khodorkovsky showed little surprise at the decision, appearing calm as the judge finished speaking. As he was hustled out of the courtroom by guards, he said Russia's "legal system will not be reformed anytime soon."

Detained since 2003, Khodorkovsky has served more than half of his sentence and has been eligible for parole for the past 10 months.

Most of that sentence has been served in the remote Chita region, nearly 4,000 miles east of Moscow. In December 2006, he was moved from a prison camp to a pretrial detention center in the city after new charges were brought against him and his business associate Platon Lebedev.

The High Court made the ruling in the case of Binyam Mohamed, who is accused of conspiring with al-Qaida leaders to attack civilians. Captured in April 2002 in Pakistan, he claims he spent 18 months in Morocco and was tortured there before being flown to an alleged CIA-run site in Afghanistan and later transferred to Guantanamo.

The accusation is important in a legal context because evidence obtained by torture will not be admissible during military tribunals being conducted at the detention center at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo.

"Compelling the British government to release information that can prove Mr. Mohamed's innocence is one obvious step towards making up for the years of torture that he has suffered," Clive Stafford Smith, director of the human rights charity Reprieve, said in a statement.

In a statement, the Foreign Office said it is considering the implications of the judgment.

The government has cited national security concerns in refusing to hand over documents.

Mohamed, an Ethiopian refugee who moved to Britain when he was 15, is the 20th detainee selected for trial at Guantanamo. He has not yet entered a plea.

The High Court heard the case over five days in August. Only some sessions were open to the public because of the sensitivity of the information.

Lawyers for former Hungarian soldier Charles Zentai said they will appeal the decision, handed down in Western Australia's Perth Magistrates Court. If it is upheld, Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus will make the final determination on whether Zentai should be extradited.

Zentai, an Australian citizen, is listed by the U.S.-based Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center among its 10 most wanted Nazis as having "participated in manhunts, persecution, and murder of Jews in Budapest in 1944."

Hungary accuses Zentai of torturing and killing 18-year-old Peter Balazs in a Budapest army barracks on Nov. 8, 1944, for failing to wear a star that would identify him as a Jew.

Zentai, who emigrated to Australia in 1950, has denied the allegations.