In association with the International Commission of Jurists

May 2007

22 May

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC Prosecutor, announced today that he is opening a formal investigation into the situation in the Central African Republic. The Prosecutor's decision marks the first time that the Court has investigated a situation in which sexual crimes against women outnumber — and significantly outnumber — killings:The Office has analysed allegations of serious crimes perpetrated in CAR,...

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21 May

Former President Carter’s criticism of the Bush Administration is the big news of the weekend. You can listen to the interview here. This is what Carter said in the interview: Carter: “I interrelate my condemnation and criticism of this unnecessary invasion with the ministry of Christ as the Prince of Peace. So that’s what I try...

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21 May

This from Harvard's Einer Elhauge, guest-blogging over at VC. Elhauge describes his new casebook, Global Antitrust Law & Economics:We put US regulations and cases side by side with the EC regulations and cases that regulate the same conduct on global markets, without suggesting that one of them is more important or necessary to understanding basic antitrust law and that...

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19 May

A little over a year ago, I noted that a Dutch court had sentenced Frans van Anraat, a chemicals dealer, to 15 years in prison for selling Iraq a key component of the mustard gas that Saddam used against the Kurds during the Anfal campaign. Last week, a Dutch appeals court upheld van Anraat's conviction for complicity in war...

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18 May

That's my hunch. It looks too much like the 1986 deal, coupling an amnesty with enhanced enforcement, the latter of which of course utterly failed. The deal announced yesterday would make pretty much all undocumented aliens arriving in the US before January 1 eligible for legalized status, under an indefinitely renewable "Z" visa program. That amounts to...

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17 May

A story that has been getting a bit of play in Europe but not as much on this side of the Atlantic is the dispute over the placement of a war memorial in Estonia. In April the Estonian government removed from its capital a memorial to Soviet soldiers who fought in WW II. Estonia’s ethnic Russian minority—and Russia—were...

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17 May

We had a ballot question in Philadelphia "urg[ing] the United States to make year 2007 the time to redeploy U.S. troops out of harm's way in Iraq," through the unusual mechanism of an amendment to the city's Home Rule Charter. The measure passed overwhelmingly (122,710 to 49,938). According to the Institute for Policy Studies (which has long promoted...

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17 May

Extremely disturbing news out of Rwanda: a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group has been arrested after being accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide by a local gacaca court:Francois-Xavier Byuma, vice-president of the board of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights ["Turengere Abana"], was detained last week in Kigali and taken Wednesday to...

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