In an effort to put its sordid past behind it -- Nisour Square was so 2007 -- Blackwater Worldwide has announced that it shall henceforth be referred to not as "Blackwater," but as "Xe" -- pronounced like the letter "Z." But why stop there? Why not go full Prince and replace the Blackwater name with a symbol that represents what the...
It sorrows me to report what I'm sure many of you have now learned, that Alison Des Forges, one of the great human rights workers and senior advisor to Human Rights Watch Africa Division, died in the plane crash of the Buffalo Continental Express flight on Thursday night, February 12, 2009. I knew Alison back in the 1990s when we...
The collision of two satellites in orbit around the earth, creating a cloud of debris and some amount of risk to the international space station, turns our thoughts to the international law of space. And thence to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, who explains it for us in a column at Popular Mechanics. I, for one, was surprised to actually read the...
This recent survey shows that the major academic journals in political science are publishing more articles on human rights than they once did. No surprise there. Perhaps more interesting number would be to see how many relate to international law more generally. As with flagship law reviews, I suspect those numbers are up as well, perhaps dramatically....
Two items suggesting the possibility. First is this excellent piece from Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect, which sets out a strong case for the inevitability of global economic regulation (he is particularly interesting on the increasingly global scope of big labor). Meyerson draws on the old New Deal analogy, which is a powerful one -- up to...
Two hundred years of Lincoln, February 12, 1809. ...
In an effort to placate critics of the U.S. Congress's stimulus package, the final revised version apparently has toned down the earlier House of Representatives proposal requiring recipients of stimulus money to "Buy American" iron and steel only. Here is the additional provision added by the Senate, and I believe it survived the final version(all emphasis is added by me): SEC. 1604....
The ICC has formally approved the ICC Prosecutor's request for an arrest warrant against Sudan's President. Kevin's post below discusses what the theory of criminal liability will be, although the actual warrant is not yet public, so we'll have to wait to see if Kevin is right about joint criminal enterprise liability. I still think that this arrest warrant is unwise and...
There is an interesting discussion going on at Alex De Waal's blog Making Sense of Darfur about the various theories of liability that might be used to hold Bashir responsible for genocide. The discussion as a whole is well worth checking out; what I want to discuss here is whether Bashir could be convicted of genocide via JCE III, so-called...
Because he says things like this: [The ICC] has not opened investigations with regard to Russia's alleged war crimes in Chechnya and Georgia, where thousands of innocent civilians were killed. Nor has it opened investigations with regard to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, the Congo and other places where civilians are routinely targeted as part of military and terrorist campaigns. That will...
Alexander Cooley of Barnard College and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University has an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune looking into how and why the U.S. is in the process of losing its air base in Kyrgyzstan. The story really gives a sense of the brass tacks of the so-called New Great Game: actually a not-so-great game of payoffs, more payoffs, threats, and...
Typically, I wouldn't take this kind of thing very seriously. The Palestinian Authority is pressing the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate accusations of war crimes committed by Israeli commanders during the recent war in Gaza. But in a clever move, the Palestinian Authority has accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC over its territory, which includes Gaza. This could in...
