The Supreme Court hears arguments in the Arizona SB 1070 case on Wednesday. I'll have some things to say on the merits over the next couple of days, but first a lament: why did the Court feel like it had to take the case in the first place? It could have waited. There are a bunch of cases making their way...
In my previous post, I discussed the Registry's report of its visit with Saif Gaddafi in Libya, which was posted on the ICC website and then removed without explanation a few hours later. It has come to my attention that the Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD) also prepared a report of that visit -- and that the...
This is our third installment of this new feature, last week's announcements can be found here. If you are organizing a conference or other event and would like to see the call for papers or the program announced on Opinio Juris please contact us. Calls for Papers The Helsinki Summer Seminar on International Law is planned for August 21-30, 2012 in Helsinki, Finland. The theme...
So reports Radio Netherlands Worldwide. The dispute, not surprisingly, involves Luis Moreno-Ocampo and Libya: This week the court’s public defender, Xavier-Jean Keita, accused chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo of siding with the Libyans and demanded he be removed from the case. In a court filing boiling with indignation, he accused Ocampo of making misleading statements during a visit to Tripoli this week...
I have uploaded a copy of the report, which was available for a couple of hours on the ICC website but then removed without explanation. (It's marked public.) Representatives of the Registry spent five days in Libya in late February and early March, so things could have changed significantly since that time. Nevertheless, the report paints an interesting -- and...
Continuing on last week’s discussion of the CIA’s General Counsel Speech, Ken Anderson posted about Daniel Klaidman’s guest post on Lawfare discussing the genesis of this speech. Another speech attracting attention was Deborah Pearlstein's discussion of a dinner talk by General Michael Haydn, CIA Director under George W. Bush, on interrogation and common article 3. If you’re losing track of...
I don't actually mean to express an editorial view here - my views on the role of social media, I've decided, are too mixed up for me to write a coherent post. But I did think this was funny. Thanks to my friend and colleague Juan Mendez and his ...
[Michael A. Newton is Professor of the Practice of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School] The Kony 2012 campaign had the laudable goal of increasing public awareness in order to aid the search for justice and accountability in the wake of LRA atrocities. In fact, the worldwide attention had the paradoxical effect of demonstrating the lamentable reality that the optimal pathway towards...
[Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor at Washington and Lee University and author of Reimagining Child Soldiers (OUP, 2012).] How does Kony2012 inform our understanding of child soldiers? How does it sculpt international efforts to prevent child soldiering? Kony2012 feeds into and reinforces pre-existing assumptions and narratives. I argue in my book Reimagining Child Soldiers that these assumptions...
[Julie McBride is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University Belfast, researching the development of the war crime of child soldier recruitment in international criminal law, and a member of the United Nations Global Experts, specializing in international crime and transitional justice. You can find her on Twitter @JA_McBride] When the Kony2012 video was launched last month, I found myself, for one of the first times,...
Anti-government protests (which forced the cancellation of last year's event) occurred at the start of the Bahrain F1 Grand Prix. The US Congress has communicated its intent to repatriate Canadian Guantanamo detainee, Omar Khadr, according to the NY Times. Abu Qatada has appealed the European Court of Human Rights' decision to allow his deportation to Yemen, but the UK Government claims that...
I generally subscribe to a constructivist theory of international relations. On many issues I do not think state interests are fixed and this fluidity allows a space for norm entrepreneurs to alter state preferences. With any successful campaign, specific actors promote ideas that catch fire and create a norm cascade reflected in consensus on the appropriate path. That consensus often...
