In association with the International Commission of Jurists

March 2009

20 Mar

Pardon the title of this post being a somewhat-obscure allusion to the standard trope of movie-trailer voice-overs, but over at Danger Room, they are well under way in their Iron Eagles search: their "celebration of the most awesomely-bad videos of the military industrial complex." Videos that often mix bad animation, worse narration, explosions, and weaponry statistics. But, for my money, they have...

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19 Mar

 Financial crisis getting you down?  You can always move your money to the virtual world of the Planet Calypso: Interstellar banking isn't here yet, but at least you can pretend. The publisher of the online science-fiction game "Entropia Universe," set on the planet Calypso, received a banking license from the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority last week and plans to open a...

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18 Mar

The following is a guest post written by Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub, the brains behind the must-read blog wronging rights.  My thanks to them for contributing it. Two weeks ago, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for the arrest of Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.  (We’re sure you all remember; it was kind of a...

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18 Mar

The Administration’s filing last week of a brief outlining its big-picture view of which Guantanamo detainees may be lawfully detained has sparked a vigorous – and I think productive – debate among international legal experts, human rights lawyers, and listserv participants on and off the blogosphere. So let me take the occasion to throw out a few recent articles/resources relevant...

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17 Mar

I have been traveling throughout the country the past few days meeting with dozens of leaders discussing the past and future of Rwanda. The meetings have been incredibly hopeful and positive and there is an undeniable optimism about the direction of the country. But wherever one goes one cannot escape the long shadow of genocide. It continues...

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17 Mar

Duke Law School's Program in Public Law recently started a new blog, Executive Watch.  According to the Duke Press release, it will feature "news stories and commentary about executive-branch actions, including executive orders, presidential memos, and signing statements."  The blog may be of interest to our readers as, in addition to issues of domestic authority, it will address perennial topics in U.S. foreign...

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17 Mar

A reader has left a comment to my previous post in which he alleges that Alex tipped off Bashir that the OPT was going to seek his arrest and speculates that Alex might have promised Bashir to oppose the genocide charges. I have reluctantly left the comment up, because I don't believe that it is my role as a blogger to...

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15 Mar

Paul Krugman's Friday column has to weigh heavily on anyone with a 7-year-old boy. The parallels are clear, at least on the back end. Krugman is hardly the first to play the Norman Angell card. Angell's ill-timed proclamation of the end of war in the run-up to the Guns of August figures prominently in the opening chapter...

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14 Mar

In public, Sudanese government officials have uniformly defended Bashir against the supposed depredations of the ICC.  According to the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, however, they tell a different story in private: A minister with the president’s National Congress Party, NCP, said that members were left reeling by the announcement of an arrest warrant issued against Bashir by ICC judges...

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