In association with the International Commission of Jurists

December 2011

08 Dec

[Odette Murray is a Legal Officer at the Office of International Law, Attorney-General's Department, Australia. David Kinley is a Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Sydney. Chip Pitts is a lecturer in law at Stanford Law School. The views expressed in these posts are those of the authors, and not of the Attorney-General's department or the Australian Government] The decision...

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08 Dec

(Update: On a more serious note, Stuart Benjamin at Volokh discusses whether Gingrich saying he would appoint Bolton as Secretary of State violated any law, as has been argued around the blogosphere; Benjamin says no law violated.) One of my Business Associations students asked me what a "black swan event" is - I think she read it in a Wall Street...

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07 Dec

Yes, at least according to this account by Douglas Gillis in Foreign Policy, the ECCC has been nearly a complete and utter failure (and a waste of money).  The main problem seems to be, according to the article, incompetent international judges (or at least one shady German judge). Obviously, the U.N. Secretariat, which was managing this tribunal, seems to have...

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07 Dec

I'm so saddened to report that Professor David J Bederman has passed away at the age of 50 after a lengthy illness. Emory has a tribute to David here. I still vividly remember my first encounter with David's work when I was a new attorney in the Legal Adviser's Office and read his concise, witty and simply wonderfully written introductory text,...

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07 Dec

Gideon Boas makes a number of valuable points in his comments on my article, not least of which is the fact that the evidentiary challenges I highlighted with respect to the Lubanga trial are not new.  I particularly appreciate the experiences he recounts from his time at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (‘ICTY’), which, like its sister tribunal...

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07 Dec

[Gideon Boas is an Associate Professor in the Monash Law School and a former Senior Legal Officer at the ICTY.] This article deals carefully with the Lubanga proceedings before the ICC, and in particular the difficulty caused by the Prosecution collecting information through the extensive use of confidentiality agreements under Article 54(3)(e) of the Rome Statute.  One of the great difficulties...

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07 Dec

[Christian De Vos is a PhD researcher at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. The author may be contacted at c.m.devos [at] cdh.leidenuniv.nl] Having recently embarked on a multi-year project that seeks to interrogate the possibilities for ‘local ownership’ in the context of the International Criminal Court (ICC), my article approaches the concept through the lens of locally-based informants and so-called...

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07 Dec

That's the question asked by my friends at Wronging Rights, in response to a recent article in Time: TIME claims to have obtained an internal ICC memo showing that the Court is "compiling evidence of possible recent war crimes in southern Sudan, allegedly directed by Sudanese Defense Minister Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein." Apparently, in addition to the Prosecutor's request...

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06 Dec

Not exactly, especially since the "blockade", is based on Argentina's claim to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.  Still, depending on where the vessels were "boarded", (e.g. in the alleged EEZ?), there might be some problem here. In any event, something like economic harassment seems to be going on. Argentine patrol vessels have boarded 12 Spanish boats, operating under fishing licences issued...

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06 Dec

News of the U.S. Postal Service’s struggles has been circulating for months, if not years. Today, the news is of distribution center closings, layoffs, and the end of next-day mail. The end of Saturday delivery may not be far behind. Obviously, a large part of the story is increased competition from independent parcel carriers – UPS, FedEx,...

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06 Dec

These are not the best of days for Greece, and even relatively small matters, like their ongoing dispute with Macedonia over the name "Macedonia" is going against them. Greece was wrong to block Macedonia's bid to join Nato in 2008 because of a row over its name, the International Court of Justice has ruled. It said Athens should have abided by a...

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