Shocking: An Army prosecutor has resigned from the Guantánamo war court in a crisis of conscience over plans to try a young Afghan accused of throwing a grenade rather than settle the case out of court, according to an affidavit filed with the court Wednesday. Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a reservist from the Pittsburgh area, becomes the fourth known prosecutor to...
The trial of Charles Taylor's son, "Chuckie," for acts of torture committed in Liberia began today in Miami: Chuckie Taylor is the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who is on trial for war crimes by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. The son is accused of responsibility for torture committed between 1997 and 2003 while he headed Liberia’s...
Apparently, France will no longer even insist that the Sudan try Haroun and Kushayb. It only wants Haroun to be removed from his government position: France had previously stressed that Sudan must turn over Ahmed Haroun, state minister for humanitarian affairs, and militia commander Ali Mohamed Ali Abdel-Rahman, also know as Ali Kushayb who are wanted by the ICC in connection...
The Seventh Circuit in Osagiede v. United States earlier this month ruled that an attorney's failure to provide information as to the client's Vienna Convention rights may constitute ineffective assistance of counsel. Effective performance by counsel representing a foreign national in a criminal proceeding is reasonable performance “under prevailing professional norms.” ...
Last week, I defended deferring the ICC's investigation of Bashir for a year in exchange for, inter alia, the Sudanese government turning Harun and Kushayb over to the ICC for prosecution. That would have been a strong demand on the part of France and the UK -- one that, I argued, Bashir would be unlikely to accept. Lest they be accused...
Yesterday, on Monday, September 22, the 63rd UN General Assembly meetings got underway. As an annual confab, it features a parade of speeches by heads of state and foreign ministers and the Secretary General. This year had a couple of special items. One was President Bush's farewell address at the UN. A second-US-centric event was the arrival of Governor Sarah...
I hope readers will forgive me for arrogating the "Featured Post" section of the blog, but I wanted to report some professional news: I have accepted a Senior Lecturer position at the University of Melbourne School of Law. I begin next semester -- March, 2009. I will greatly miss the University of Auckland. It's a wonderful law school, with excellent students...
I have posted a new essay on SSRN, "Situational Gravity Under the Rome Statute," which is forthcoming in Future Directions in International Criminal Justice, a book that Carsten Stahn and Larissa van den Herik are editing for TMC Asser/Cambridge University Press. Here is the abstract: The ICC is often derided as the “African Criminal Court.” That criticism cannot easily be dismissed:...
(Update, Saturday, September 27, 2008. As a reminder that credit markets and banks are globally interlinked, note that even as WaMu fell in the United States and was taken over by the FDIC, in Europe the Dutch-Belgium Fortis Group (banking and insurance) was under major pressure and might well fall by early next week. Major pressure means that market investors...
Two interesting trials involving very old defendants began last week. The first, in Poland, involves General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who orchestrated the Polish government's brutal repression of Solidarity in 1981: The 85-year-old man, who was once the very symbol of communist repression, faces a possible ten-year jail sentence for “directing a criminal organisation” – a reference to the Military Council that imposed...
Eric Posner, over at VC, remarks on the continuing attention to Carl Schmitt, and indeed the increasing attention to him within the American jurisprudential community: Why do people like me and Sandy Levinson keep talking about the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt? Schmitt was skeptical that a parliamentary democracy can handle crises: it can only role over and let the executive act....
The letters section of the Times is probably not long for the world but it does still have the function of pulling out pithy representative statements from what would otherwise be lost in the haystack of the paper's website comments section. So here's this from Northwestern University lawprof Steve Calabresi on Adam Liptak's excellent piece from Friday on the flagging international stature of...
