The drive from Paarl to Cape Town was only forty-five minutes. The plan was for Nelson Mandela to address the world at the Grand Parade, the great public square adjacent to the Fort of Good Hope, where South Africa’s founding father Jan van Riebeck had established a toehold for the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century. As Mandela drew near to the Grand Parade an enormous crowd enveloped his car. A massive hailstorm of joyous fists hammered down on the boot and bonnet. Well-wishers jumped on the car in celebration, and it began to shake violently. “I felt as though the crowd might very well kill us with their love,” Mandela recalled. Attempts to clear a path were futile and Mandela sat there, stranded in his vehicle for hours. After over ten thousand days of imprisonment, Mandela was now imprisoned by tens of thousands of his most ardent supporters.

Parade marshals eventually came to the rescue, and Mandela finally reached his destination several hours late. Standing on the balcony of the City Hall overlooking the Grand Parade, he looked down on “a boundless sea of people cheering, holding flags and banners, clapping and laughing.” He began his speech in his native Xhosa tongue, leading the massive crowd in the responsive chant that was a regular feature of anti-apartheid gatherings.

“Power!” Mandela bellowed with his fist raised.

“It is ours!” replied the cheering crowd.

“Power!” Mandela repeated.

“It is ours!” yelled the throngs.

“Africa!” chanted Mandela.

“Let it come back!” they chanted back.

“Let it come back!” Mandela replied.

“Africa!” they answered, in a crescendo that was decades in the making.

As the crowd settled down, Mandela embarked on a militant speech that embraced the battle against apartheid on all fronts. “Our struggle has reached a decisive moment,” Mandela said. “We call on our people to seize this moment so that the process toward democracy is rapid and uninterrupted. We have waited too long for our freedom. We can no longer wait.” Saluting communists and combatants, embracing international sanctions, and vowing to continue the armed struggle against apartheid, Mandela catered to his swelling ranks and flamed the fears of his nervous opponents. After twenty-seven years of internal exile, Mandela knew that the first step toward peace was to restore his leadership within the African National Congress.

White South Africans were shocked by Mandela’s fiery speech. The day before President F.W. de Klerk had assured them that Nelson Mandela was “committed to a peaceful solution and a peaceful process.” After hearing the speech, de Klerk felt deceived. “I realized once again that the road ahead would be extremely difficult.”

The great question that had vexed South Africa for decades was, “Not if, but when?” When would the dawn come? The sun-tipped mountains shone bright, but the great valleys, the valleys where old men and women scratched the red blood soil to survive, remained in darkness. “When,” in the words of Cry the Beloved Country, would “that dawn … come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear?” “Why, that,” Alan Paton concluded, “[was] a secret.” Forty years after that forlorn question was asked it remained an unanswered secret.

The answer did not come on February 11, 1990, the day of Mandela’s release. Nothing Mandela said that day assuaged white fears or emancipated black bondage. At most one could glimpse the first lights of the new dawn on the tips of the mountain. “The road ahead may be long and hazardous,” wrote Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “but at long last it seems what so many have prayed and fasted for … seems more attainable than ever before.”

President F.W. de Klerk, the one responsible for Mandela’s freedom, was more sanguine: “I was struck by an inescapable truth: an irreversible process had begun—and nobody could predict precisely how it would end.”

I love Canada, and I have long been intrigued by plans to unite the U.S. and Canada in deeper political and economic integration (See this post from 2005(!)). So I have been excited to see the idea getting some mainstream media love with discussions of Diane Francis’s new book  Merger of the Century: Why the U.S. and Canada Should Become One Country.

I haven’t read the book, but judging from the zillions of media excerpts, her argument appears pretty straightforward.  The U.S. and Canada should merge, largely on economic grounds, so that the two countries can compete with rising economic powers controlled by state-owned enterprises (e.g. China) and with growing military power (China and Russia).  I am not sure merger is really needed here, and I am also unsure what the Canadians get out of merger since they already get U.S. military protection and seem to move in and out of the U.S. in large numbers at will.  But whatever, I love this idea.

Still, how exactly would such a “merger” work legally? Francis suggests either the Germany 1990 model (would Canada be East Germany?) or some sort of European Union-type treaty.  Let’s put aside the “merger” idea because unless Canada just entered the U.S. as a gigantic state, or even several states, any merger would require a U.S. constitutional amendment. And bringing in Canada as states would make the Democratic Party the governing party in the U.S. for the rest of my lifetime and my daughters’.  Republicans know this, and would never agree.

An E.U.-style customs union would be much more realistic.  The U.S. and Canada could create by treaty a common external trade policy, and work to eliminate restrictions on the freedom of movement, goods, investment, and services within North America.  NAFTA is sort of halfway there, actually, without the common external trade policy.

The U.S. and Canada could also unify their external foreign and military policies (much harder, I admit), again on the EU model. With respect to North American domestic defense, the US and Canada are already kind of there with a joint Air Defense Identification Zone.  Naval cooperation would be pretty easy too.  Now about foreign policy, though.  That would be really hard.  We don’t like killing baby seals, and Canadians are not psyched about invading Middle Eastern or Central Asian countries.

In reality, I think Francis might be satisfied with a U.S.-Canada customs union (Mexico might have to be left out for now). She is mostly making her case on economic grounds, and I think a customs union would accomplish most of her goals. It is not legally that hard, and it is politically plausible. The only downside is that we wouldn’t get to design new flags or new country names.  The United States of North America (USNA)?  The North American Union?  Camerica? Americanada?…

Simon Lester of the IELP Blog raises an interesting and possibly important point about the new WTO Agreement just reached in Bali.  In order for the U.S. to enter into the agreement, will the U.S. Congress have to approve it?

On first glance, the answer would seem to be: “yes” since the U.S. Congress invariably is required to approve all U.S. trade agreements (as opposed to just the Senate, if it were a treaty).  In any event, I would have thought the U.S. Congress would have to approve the new Bali agreement as new legislation.  But then Simon points out this comment by U.S. trade officials from Inside U.S. Trade:

At the press conference, Punke said the Obama administration does not believe the deal requires congressional approval. “Our analysis of the trade facilitation agreement is it can be effectuated through administrative means and would not require legislation to put it into force,” he said. The obligations of the trade facilitation agreement are enforceable under the WTO Dispute Settlement Understanding.

This makes sense if one thinks of congressional approval of executive agreements as simply implementation of international obligations into domestic U.S. law.  But the congressional role in trade agreements has also been understood to fill in for the role of the U.S. Senate in approving treaties even if those treaties have no domestic law impact.  For U.S. law purposes, the President can’t enter into a treaty unless the Senate gives its advice and consent.  In the trade agreement context, I think many scholars have thought that Congress’ approval of those agreements by a majority of both houses serves the same role of giving the input of the legislature on the President’s decisions to enter into international agreements.

Or perhaps not.  Maybe the President really is free to bind the U.S. under international law via executive agreement on trade matters without any approval of Congress as long as no domestic law change is needed. This means that trade agreements really are just sole executive agreements that Congress is not really approving, but just implementing into U.S. domestic law.  And if no implementation is required, no Congress. This makes sense, but I just don’t think this the common understanding of how or why these congressional-executive agreements work.

One way out of this problem is (as Simon also points out) to understand the Bali Agreement as an amendment to the WTO Agreement. That agreement  (in Art. X) specifically outlines a mechanism for amendment which requires “consensus” (e.g. unanimity) or (depending on which provision is being affected) a two-thirds vote of the Ministerial Conference. In this way, Congress may be understood to have already approved future amendments to the WTO Agreement when it “approved” the original WTO Agreement back in 1994.  This “delegation” theory is probably a better explanation of why no congressional approval qua approval is needed for the Bali Agreement. Not totally satisfying, but probably enough here.

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world:

Middle East

• The UN General Assembly has elected Jordan to the Security Council to replace Saudi Arabia, which had rejected the seat in an unprecedented act to protest the council’s failure to end the Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts.
• Syria’s Bashar al-Assad will remain president and lead any transition agreed upon in Geneva peace talks planned for next month, a government minister has insisted.
• Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s local branch in Syria, has sent Al Jazeera exclusive footage of what it said was a drone it shot down while it was flying over Aleppo, saying it was the first operation of its kind for the group.
• Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have killed seven children during fighting for the town of Nabek, north of the capital Damascus, activists said.
• UN inspectors visited an Iranian plant linked to a planned heavy-water reactor that could yield nuclear bomb fuel, taking up an initial offer by Tehran to open its disputed nuclear program to greater scrutiny.

Asia

• The World Trade Organization reached its first ever trade reform deal to the roar of approval from nearly 160 ministers who had gathered in Bali to decide on the make-or-break agreement that could add $1 trillion to the global economy.
  
• US Vice President said that North Korea would never achieve prosperity as long as it continued to pursue nuclear arms, but added Washington remained open to dialogue if Pyongyang can show its willingness to honor its commitments.
• The UN and US called for investigations into the findings of a Reuters report that Thai immigration officials moved Myanmar refugees into human trafficking rings.
• Chuck Hagel, the US defense secretary, has held talks in Rawalpindi with Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister, as part of an effort to defuse tensions over controversial US drone strikes and Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan.

Africa

• South Africa expects overwhelming crowds and a host of world leaders to attend services honoring late President Nelson Mandela, the anti-apartheid icon who led the country’s transition from white-minority rule to multi-racial democracy.
• UN forces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo have launched unmanned aircraft to monitor the volatile border with Rwanda and Uganda, the first time UN peacekeepers have deployed surveillance drones.
• France said it will start disarming fighters in the Central African Republic by force if necessary, as relative calm returned to the capital Bangui following three days of heavy fighting between Christians and Muslims.

Europe

• The Vatican refused to provide the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child with information on the Church’s internal investigations into the sexual abuse of children by clergy, saying that its policy was to keep such cases confidential.
• Sweden has been a key partner for the United States in spying on Russia, Swedish television reported on Thursday, citing leaked documents from the U.S. National Security Agency provided by Glenn Greenwald.
• Authorities in Moscow are investigating whether Russian children adopted by American families were illegally trafficked in the United States.
• Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy urged more unity for Europe and said a banking union for the region should be finalized this month.

Americas

• A Pakistani immigrant in the US who says he was held for more than 10 months in solitary confinement after being falsely arrested on terrorism charges has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Miami, saying he was a victim of “overzealousness” in the U.S. war on terrorism. 
• Colombia’s main leftist guerrilla group, the FARC, said it would implement a 30-day ceasefire from December 15 while the government said it would keep pursuing the rebels after they attacked a police station a day earlier, killing eight.

The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the U.S. government agency that regulates offshore fishing, has proposed a new set of regulations to reduce bycatch of Bluefin tuna by economic disincentive. The Washington Post reports that:

“Under the proposal, the NMFS would sharply cut back the number of bluefin tuna that individual fishing vessels are allowed to capture accidentally, setting a quota for each boat and requiring fishermen to include the bluefin they discard at sea under that cap. The NMFS also would change the long-standing formula by which it calculates the number of pounds of bluefin tuna that a long-liner may legally bring to shore for sale.”

This effort is very much in line with an article I’ve just published on incentivizing compliance on the high seas.   The article is available here, and it argues for an incentives based approach to management, using the 1911 Sea Fur Seals treaty as a model.  I argue that the scarcity problem of common resources on the high seas should be addressed by better governance and incentives, not by a property rights approach.

Another noteworthy developments on managing high seas tuna fisheries is this new program for a partnership between the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), a 183 member organization that has acted as a financial mechanism for a number of international climate conventions, in which the latter has committed a whopping $30 million, and is leveraging an additional $150 million in co-financing.   This project will run from 2013 through 2018, and aims to reduce illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing through monitoring and control, to lessen ecological impacts from illegal fishing, and to improve biodiversity.   Árni M. Mathiesen, FAO Assistant Director-General for Fisheries and Aquaculture stated: “Through collective action at all levels and broad cooperation that optimizes the use of scarce resources, this project – and the wider Common Oceans  initiative – will help move the world away from ‘the race to fish’ and towards implementation of an ecosystem approach. This is crucial to ensuring the future well-being and productivity of these vital marine ecosystems. Early successes will create incentives for donors and agencies to further invest in these types of catalytic projects.”

If you have an opinion on the NMFS regulations, the deadline for public comments ends on December 10.

China’s East China Sea Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) has spawned tons of media commentary, so much so that I have had little to add and can barely keep up with all the coverage. Still, there is one small legal point that bears some further discussion.  While I think the U.S. is correct as a matter of policy to push back against China’s ADIZ, the legal framework underlying the U.S. position is awkward and borderline incoherent.  In fact, the confusing U.S. legal position may explain why the U.S. is not sympatico with Japan on China’s ADIZ.  Let me explain.

It is worth noting that U.S. has not condemned China’s ADIZ as a violation of international law. Instead, the U.S. has called it “unacceptable” and a change in the “status quo”.  Meanwhile, the Chinese have wielded international law as a rhetorical weapon on their side, by citing the U.N. Charter from the outset.  This may seem odd, but in fact, the Chinese are sort of right about this.

As Peter Dutton notes in his AJIL article, establishing an ADIZ is not in itself a violation of international law,  Indeed, it is usually justified by a need to create an early warning system to protect national airspace.  China’s ADIZ seems pretty large (map can be found here), and the U.S has rightly complained that aircraft just transiting the ADIZ should not be subject to China’s requirements if those airlines are not planning to enter (or even come near to) Chinese national airspace.

But China’s ADIZ is carefully drawn to include two sets of islands/rocks that it claims as sovereign territory: the Senkakus/Diaoyu (also claimed by Japan) and the Ieodo/Suyan Rock (also claimed by South Korea).  To the extent those territories are “national airspace”, China can argue that it should be allowed to draw an ADIZ around them to ensure any airplanes coming near them will not enter that airspace, etc.  As Zachary Keck suggests, China is using the ADIZ to subtly build its legal claim to sovereignty over the Senkakus/Diaoyu Islands. Hence, China is probably invoking the UN Charter’s self-defense provision to justify its ADIZ and its need for all foreign aircraft to report flight info/etc. when entering the ADIZ.  (Some commenters to my first post have suggested China can’t invoke self-defense over a disputed territory, or uninhabited islands that don’t otherwise threaten its national airspace.  I am not sure the customary practice is clear on this, since Japan’s ADIZ, which also covers the Senkakus/Diaoyu, couldn’t be justified either under this view. Also, for the purposes of this post, I am assuming China has a plausible claim to the islands).

Seen from this perspective (at least vis-a-vis the U.S.), China’s ADIZ is not inconsistent with any existing international agreement or customary legal rule.  This is largely because of the strange and confusing U.S. position on the sovereignty over the Senkakus/Diaoyu Islands.  The U.S. does not take any official position on which country (China, Taiwan, or Japan) has sovereignty over these islands.  But it recognizes that Japan has administration over them (indeed, it was the U.S. that turned them over to Japan back in 1972) and the U.S. has repeatedly declared that such islands fall within the scope of the U.S.-Japan Defense Treaty.But since the U.S. does not recognize Japanese sovereignty over the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, why should it complain when China draws an ADIZ intended to protect airspace over those islands?

This wrinkle in the U.S. position also explains Japan’s harsher reaction to the Chinese ADIZ. To Japan, China is literally demanding Japanese airlines report to its military before crossing airspace into or near Japan’s own national airspace.  It would be like China demanding information from US airlines flying between San Francisco and Hawaii (Congress would explode with indignation).  But from the U.S. perspective, China is just demanding information about airlines flying near disputed airspace that may or may not be part of China anyway.  This is a threat to freedom of international air navigation, but it is not anything like the same kind of affront to sovereignty that it is to the Japanese.

The U.S. position would be more legally coherent if it would simply recognize Japan’s sovereignty over the Senkakus/Diaoyu.  After all, if the U.S. Navy is willing to fight and die for these islands, the U.S. should at least decide whose owns these islands. (If China creates an ADIZ in the South China Sea, the U.S. will also have the same dilemma. See Michael Kelly’s recent essay on the strategic implications of such an ADIZ).  China is subtly probing the U.S. position here, and it has opened up a slight wedge between the U.S. and Japan.  But this wedge is a result of contradictions in the U.S. legal position, not China’s clever diplomacy.

Calls for Papers

• As the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 Commission Report approaches, the recurring dispute over the boundaries of the post-9/11 national security state is once again in full swing. Governing Intelligence will move beyond the surveillance debate to start an interdisciplinary dialogue about the power and limits of intelligence agencies from a comparative and international perspective. The Stanford Journal of International Law seeks contributions by academics, practitioners, and policymakers in the form of approx. 10-15,000-word scholarly essays or 5,000-word white papers on either of the following topics: (a) National Intelligence & Transnational Threats; or, (b) Individual Rights & Intelligence Gathering. Please send a 1-2 page abstract of your essay or white paper in Word format, a C.V. of the author(s), and point of contact information to sjilboard [at] gmail [dot] com by 5:00PM PST on February 1, 2014. The full announcement, along with sub-topics and submissions instructions, can be found here.
• The British Branch of the International Law Association has issued a call for papers for the Spring Conference (May 23-24, 2014). The organizers are particularly interested in contributions that shed new light on the following foundational questions: the relationship between international, regional and domestic legal orders; the identification and development of customary international law; and the regulation of armed conflict. Re-examining foundations in the light of new information and modes of thinking leads naturally to the imagination of possible futures. In this respect we are also seeking papers that explore the relevance of new theoretical paradigms (for example, the idea of transnational law) or analyze issues of concern to present and future generations, such as combating climate change, preventing human trafficking, managing financial risk, encouraging businesses to respect human rights and promoting socially responsible investment.This conference will combine pace-setting panels with keynote speeches that will present a striking vision of lawmaking in the future. The organisers also welcome the submission of unsolicited proposals. These should be one page long and sent to ilaconf [at] kcl [dot] ac [dot] uk by 30 January 2014. The call can also be found here (.pdf).

Events

•  ALMA and the Radzyner School of Law of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) would like to invite you to the next session of the Joint International Humanitarian Law Forum. The session will be held on December 16, 2013.  In this session Dr. Ruvi Ziegler will present his new paper: Non refoulement Between Common Article 1 and Common Article 3. The article considers whether, in the context of armed conflicts, certain non-refoulement obligations of non-belligerent States can be derived from the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Following the lectures there will be an open round-table discussion, all of which will be conducted in English. Those who wish to participate are asked to register in advance at forum [at] alma-ihl [dot] org. More information can be found here.

Announcements

• ASIL’s Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict has submitted a reminder for its call for the Richard R. Baxter Military Writing Prize (.pdf). Deadline for submission is December 31, 2013.
• The GlobalTrust Project at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law, directed by Professor Eyal Benvenisti, invites candidates interested in exploring themes related to this project, to apply. There is one post-doctoral fellowship ($25,000 per one year), two doctoral fellowships ($20,000 per year, up to three years) and two visiting fellowships ($1,500 per month, between 3-6 months). The application deadline (for the academic year of 2014-2015) is 1 February, 2014. For more information about the project, click here. Click here for information about the fellowships.

Last week’s events and announcements can be found here. If you would like to post an announcement on Opinio Juris, please contact us.

I’ve been so distracted with my own projects and with China’s ADIZ that I forgot to note that Russia has been in violation of its obligations under UNCLOS since at least December 2.  But that’s OK, it seems that everyone else has forgotten this fact as well.

December 2 was the date set by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea for compliance with its order that Russia “immediately release the vessel Arctic Sunrise  and all persons who have been detained, upon the posting of a bond or other financial security by the Netherlands….”  The Netherlands has posted that bond, and as far as I can tell, the Arctic Sunrise has not been released, and none of the detainees have been allowed to leave the “territory and maritime areas under the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation.”  (All have been granted bail, though.)

Russia has no obligation to participate in the ITLOS proceeding, but it has a clear obligation under Article 290(5) to “comply promptly with any provisional measures prescribed…” by the ITLOS.  So Russia is now in plain violation with a lawful judgment of the ITLOS.

What is amazing about this violation in plain sight is that the media appears to have forgotten about this lingering ITLOS order. Russia ignores the ITLOS, and….nothing.  Even the reliable Greenpeace Blog is fairly quiet since their folks are out on bail.  So it turns out no one really cares all that much that the ITLOS has been essentially rendered a nullity in this case as a result of the unilateral action of one of UNCLOS’s member states. I suppose that the Dutch are working out some sort of diplomatic settlement. But this doesn’t change the formal legal violation.

Why do I bring this up? Because if Russia takes no reputational hit from its defiance of ITLOS here, then it seems less likely that other states will worry about the reputational hit from defying ITLOS or other international courts.  Hence, Paul Reichler (the Philippines U.S. attorney in its arbitration) is almost certainly wrong when he said recently:

….[T]here is a heavy price to pay for a state that defies an international court order, or a judgment of an arbitral tribunal that is seen, that is recognized, in the international community as legitimate, as fair, as correct, as appropriate,” Reichler said in a forum hosted by the US-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) on Tuesday evening, Philippine time.

“There’s a price to be paid for branding yourself as an international outlaw, as a state that doesn’t respect, that doesn’t comply with international law,” said the topnotch lawyer, who has defended sovereign states for over 25 years.

Hmm…Iran in 1980 (Hostages), the U.S. in 1984 (Nicaragua) and 2008 (Mexico), Colombia in 2013 (Nicaragua)…uh, sorry Paul, I’m not seeing any heavy prices being paid.   So far, Russia is offering a real-life empirical counter-example to Reichler’s claim. Indeed, I don’t see that Russia is paying much of a price at all, so far.  Maybe this is because Russia’s international reputation is not exactly at an all time high, right now. Stlll, China is watching.  If Russia can ignore ITLOS in a case where they actually have detained 30 foreign nationals (mostly from the U.S., Australia, and Europe), then do we really think China will suffer much damage from ignoring an arcane ruling about a bunch of rock/islands where no actual human beings are actually affected?

Amidst all the more substantial reflections on the life of Nelson Mandela, it feels ridiculously trivial to keep thinking of my own fleeting moment of meeting him back in 1994. But keep thinking of it I do. I was a terribly junior staffer in the Clinton White House then, a writer and editor of presidential prose, at least for those texts unimportant enough for the more senior members of the staff to worry about keeping for themselves. Mandela was the newly elected President of South Africa, in town for an official state visit to the White House, and to address what turned out to be massive crowds in various other venues around town. He was a rock star.

It was a spectacular early fall day, and four or five of us juniors had ventured outside to loiter next to the small driveway that separates the West Wing from (what was then called) the Old Executive Office Building. Ostensibly, someone had wanted to smoke. In reality, as had to have been completely evident as the group edged toward the side of the drive that would afford the best view of Mandela addressing the press outside West Wing reception after he left his oval office meeting, we were hoping to catch a last glimpse. We weren’t disappointed – soon there he was, not 40 feet away, taking his place at the outside podium, calmly taking questions, saying who knew what to the similarly adoring press (we were too far away to hear the exchange).

The press was dispersing, and we were about to, too, when he turned away from his own waiting staff and began walking toward us, all by himself. Those long moments it took him to cross what seemed like far too great a distance to be worth the trouble, I kept thinking that there must be someone else, someone more senior, behind us. Or that one of my young colleagues was actually his secret godchild. Or anything that would reasonably explain why Nelson Mandela would take the time to walk an extra 40 feet in our direction. But it wasn’t any of that. He was just walking over to say hello. To shake our hands, each in turn.

When my turn came, I could barely remember my name. “And what do you do, Deborah?” he asked, shaking my hand, as gracious as anyone I had met – vastly more gracious than most I had met – in Washington so far. I must’ve said something because he gently nodded and laughed before moving on to my colleague. By then I was marveling at how gentle he seemed, how peaceful. And wondering how he and the President had gotten along. How he had approached the small talk in those conversations – the man on the one side whose ascendancy to the presidency had been a historically modest political triumph, the man on the other side who had become president by changing the world.

There was something else, too, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on at first. Not until he had turned to walk away. He had looked me in the eyes when he shook my hand – had done so to each of us I think. It was an unfamiliar sensation in professional Washington. Out in social D.C., folks would commonly look past me, over my shoulder to whomever was older, more interesting, more important. On White House territory, everyone’s gaze almost always flickered chest-ward on first meeting – to the security badge whose color distinguished the status of those who had access to the West Wing from those who didn’t. One could explain Mandela’s difference in this regard easily enough I suppose. He didn’t know the badge code. He had already met all the more senior people he needed to meet. Had no one at all he needed yet to impress. Had the gift of the greatest of politicians – the ability to make one feel as if one matters most in the world.

All of that is probably true. It is also true that he knew what it meant, human dignity. He knew what it was worth. And what was so very remarkable about him – he never stopped teaching by example.

The WTO’s new Director-General Roberto Azevedo is celebrating a rare event:  The WTO’s entire 159-country membership has finally reached  a new multilateral agreement.  This is the first time that the WTO’s membership as a whole (as opposed to smaller groups of its member states) has reached an agreement since it was formed in 1994 and the first set of agreements under the so-called “Doha” round of negotiations that has been going on since 2001.  Most commentary in the United States and elsewhere describe this as a pretty small-bore agreement on trade facilitation and agriculture (especially given the scope of the original agenda under Doha).

I am intrigued by some commentary coming out of Bali to the effect that a new agreement is needed to keep the WTO relevant and legitimate in the eyes of its members.  The WSJ has this unattributed comment:

Some negotiators said the limited pact gives the WTO credibility to continue its other main role: as an arbiter of trade disputes.

The WTO works by consensus and the breakdown of the talks could also have hurt the organization’s dispute-settling mechanism, they said.

I guess I am skeptical that the lack of progress on  new agreements will have any serious impact on the ability of the WTO’s famous dispute settlement body to stay relevant.  With or without the new agreement, the WTO is already an immensely deep and complex web of legal obligations for a larger and larger set of members. Interpreting these obligations, and managing disputes, is probably significant enough to most members that they don’t feel like they need a new agreement to stay engaged.

Anyway, the Bali agreement is only a “draft ministerial declaration” which needs to be formalized next year.  Then, the U.S. Congress will have a chance to vote on it (and probably the Asian and European regional trade deals).  This ought to be loads of fun in a congressional election year.  At least they don’t have to get two-thirds of the U.S. Senate on board.

The two-part series I mentioned in my previous post seems designed to rehabilitate Judge Harhoff’s image in the international-law community. Unfortunately, the articles, which draw heavily on an interview with the judge himself, simply underscore why it was necessary for the ICTY to remove him from the Seselj case. To begin with, consider what the judge says in the second article about how his infamous email, sent to 56 of his closest friends, was leaked to the press. One might speculate that one of those 56 friends might have leaked it. But not Judge Harhoff. He suspects the shadowy hand of foreign intelligence services (emphasis added):

For Mr. Harhoff, however, the rub was elsewhere. He asks: Who would have had an interest in leaking the email – and why leak it to a tabloid newspaper like B.T.?

”None of 56 recipients reads a newspaper like B.T. If one of them wanted to leak my email they would most likely have preferred more reputable newspapers such as Politiken or Information,” Mr. Harhoff inferred, “and at least they would have consulted me first.”

All 56 recipients have since given him personal guarantees they didn’t leak it. Mr. Harhoff also asked each of them whether they had forwarded his message to someone else, but not everyone responded to this question. So he believes that in all likelihood the mail was passed on to a third party unknown to him.

Who could it be?

”I am sure that all judges are having their email correspondence monitored,” Mr. Harhoff said (a suspicion shared by several other judges, as far as Information has been able to ascertain).

”It might make sense to assume that if a foreign intelligence service were able to read my email this would be a smart way to silence me by making it public”, he said.

Yes, foreign intelligence services — presumably those of Israel and the US, whom Judge Harhoff believes put pressure on President Meron to adopt the specific-direction requirement — are so worried about one judge at a tribunal with limited jurisdiction that they read his email and conspire to silence him. Makes perfect sense.

Judge Harhoff also has interesting things to say about his President Meron accusation:

During the interview, Mr. Harhoff seemed to be of two minds. On the one hand, he conceded that his contention of Mr. Meron’s possible motives was ”pure  speculation”. On the other hand, he left open the possibility that a likely explanation for Mr. Meron’s radical departure from a “more or less set practice” could be that he had somehow been influenced by outside military interests.

”In military establishments, some people might have been uncomfortable having to accept the evolving liberal jurisprudence at ICTY, since this could set a precedent for the International Criminal Court, ICC. And in the future that could make it very hard to be a general,” Mr. Harhoff said.

[snip]

In the interview Mr. Harhoff mused: ”Why was it so important for Meron to ensure the acquittal of two Croatian officers who were accused of indiscriminate shelling of towns and civilian centers?”

He wondered: ”It has been pointed out by many others that the United States strongly supported the Croats with arms and intelligence. Gotovina was only able to defeat the Serbs militarily because of the American support. Would that in any way implicate the US Army? Probably not. But we don’t know what the accused might have revealed, if he had been convicted.”

So Judge Harhoff admits that it is “pure speculation” that President Meron manipulated his fellow judges into acquitting Perisic, Stanisic, and Simatovic.(And apparently Gotovina.) But he still believes — and, worse, says to a journalist after the email scandal — that President Meron is an American and Israeli puppet.

And we’re supposed to believe that the ICTY shouldn’t have removed Judge Harhoff from the Seselj case?