Two weeks ago, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, briefed the Security Council on the results of his investigation into the situation in Darfur. Not suprisingly, he found the widespread commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity: The Office has so far documented (from public and non-public sources) thousands of alleged direct killings of...
Imagine a man who professes over and over his unending love for a woman but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents were or where she went to school or what her life had been until he came along--and furthermore, doesn't care to learn. What would you think of such a person? Yet we appear...
A few months ago, I noted the repeated failure of Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, the special prosecutor investigating past government abuses in Mexico, to indict former president Luis Echeverria on genocide charges. Carrillo has finally succeeded: a Mexican court of appeals held on Friday that it had sufficient evidence to charge Echeverria with genocide in connection with the "Tlatelolco massacre,"...
One small sidenote about Hamdan that struck me this morning: the superiority of the blogosphere over the mainsteam media to address breaking news such as Supreme Court decisions. Were any of you just dying to know what Adam Liptak or Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times thought about Hamdan? I had very little interest in their take...
Georgetown's new faculty blog has some great stuff on Hamdan, including summaries of a recent panel about Hamdan that included Neal Katyal (lead counsel for Hamdan), David Luban, Mark Tushnet, and Carlos Vázquez. (There also is an audio of the panel available here and a C-Span video available here). ...
Excellent news out of Manila: last week the Philippines became the 125th country to ban the use of capital punishment for all crimes, a move that commutes the death sentences of nearly 1,200 prisoners to life imprisonment. This is the second time that the Philippines has abolished capital punishment; although the country's constitution eliminated the death penalty in 1987,...
