Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced that the United States would give Afghanistan its own fleet of aerial surveillance drones and would speed up the handover of detainees held by American forces. The European Court of Human Rights has found in Eweida and Others v. The United Kingdom (ECHR court document) that British Airways discriminated against a devoutly Christian employee by making her...
A top US diplomacy team has been sent to Japan and South-Korea to douse the simmering tensions between the two nations. Facing strong electoral competition from EU skeptic parties, the Icelandic government has suspended negotiations on EU accession until after the elections in April. Navi Pillay has called for an international inquiry into widespread human rights abuses in North Korea during the past decades. Cuba has relaxed restrictions on Cuban's freedom to...
French fighter jets pounded Islamist rebel strongholds deep in northern Mali on Sunday as Paris poured more troops into the capital Bamako, awaiting a West African force to dislodge al Qaeda-linked insurgents from the country's north. Britain has given logistical support to the French operation to stop al-Qaeda affiliates in Mali. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has said that its military operation...
India has accused Pakistan of killing two of Indian soldiers in the disputed region of Kashmir, but Pakistan has denied any involvement and its media are playing down the incident. Hugo Chavez is too ill to be sworn in for his new term as President of Venezuela, raising a whole raft of constitutional questions. A military judge hearing the case against Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks affair...
A U.S. drone strike killed eight people in northwestern Pakistan, the latest in a series of drone attacks that come as a retired U.S. general Stanley McChrystal warns their overuse may threaten American foreign policy goals. The trial of former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic resumed in The Hague on Monday. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has asked that government-issued documents, such as...
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rejected peace talks with his enemies in a defiant speech that his opponents described as a renewed declaration of war. Foreign Affairs officials in the EU, UK and Turkey have responded sceptically and have called on Assad to step down. A U.S. drone strike killed at least 10 people suspected to be Taliban fighters in Pakistan's northern tribal areas, intelligence sources said, days...
Upcoming Events On January 10-11, 2013, The T.M.C. Asser Instituut and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague, in cooperation with the International Humanitarian and Criminal Law Platform, the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, the Municipality of The Hague and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will host a symposium entitled The Boundaries of the Battlefield: A Critical Look at the Legal Paradigms and Rules in...
A "senior Al-Qaeda figure" was killed in Yemen via a US drone strike yesterday, along with two others. For more on the SDNY's decision granting summary judgement to the US government about the FOIA suit we covered yesterday, Bloomberg covers it here, Politico has a story here, the ACLU has a press release here, the New York Times has a story here and an op-ed here, the Washington Post weighs...
According to the UN, the death toll of the Syrian conflict now exceeds 60,000. A US drone strike has killed Mullah Nazir, a Pakistani Taliban commander. The IMF has stated that the US "fiscal cliff" deal is not enough to bring the economy back on a sustainable path. Judge McMahon of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York has granted summary judgment to the government...
Thousands have protested in Hong Kong to demand the resignation of the China-backed chief executive and democratic leadership elections. Seven charity workers have been killed by gunmen in Pakistan when they visited a community centre that serves as a school and a clinic. According to South Korea's Finance Ministry, unification of the two Koreas could cost the South up to 7 percent of annual GDP for...
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued a press release welcoming the National Congress of Argentina’s recent approval of legislation that creates the System for Prevention of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment. The Yemen-based branch of al Qaeda has offered a bounty for anyone who kills the U.S. ambassador to Yemen or an American soldier in the impoverished...
The US and the UN have raised security alerts in the Central African Republic and the US has now decided to close its embassy in response to the security risks posed by the rebels advancing to the capital. A spokesperson for the new Japanese government has refused to confirm that the new PM would uphold the 1993 apology to women used as sex slaves...
