The U.S. government indicted 50 top members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or FARC) yesterday on charges of conspiracy to manufacture and export illegal narcotics to the United States (the full indictment is here). FARC is a left-wing paramilitary group dedicated to the overthrow of the Colombia government. They have been battling the Colombian government since the 1960s and...
The House of Lords has upheld the decision of a British high school to prohibit one of its students from wearing a head-to-toe jilbab dress to school. The full text of the House of Lords decision in R v. Headteacher and Governors of Denbigh High School is here. The House of Lords was interpreting Protocol 1 to the European Convention...
Time for more self promotion...
On a much lighter note, the LA Times has an update on just one of many sources of tension in the China-Taiwan relationship: pandas. China has been offering the pandas as a goodwill gift to Taiwan, but Taiwan's pro-independence government won't take them, suggesting an acceptance would be a "Trojan Horse" reducing Taiwan's psychological defenses. China has been playing up...
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs had a very brief press conference in Algeria yesterday where he endorsed Algeria's Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation (for a brief summary see here). The Charter was suspiciously but overwhelmingly endorsed by a referendum last year and ends judicial proceedings against alleged extremist Islamic terrorists. Of course, it...
As the world continues to wring its hands over the slow-motion genocide in Darfur, libertarian legal scholars are beginning to point out one possible solution that doesn't involve the United Nations or even NATO: Arm the victims of the Sudanese genocide. Indeed, they would go farther and enshrine an international human right to resist genocide, that includes the right...
From the department of the obscure but important news, the U.S., Japan, and Australia have been holding a "Trilateral Dialogue" on security issues (see a joint statement released today here). On its face, all this means is that the three countries will have regular ministerial-level consultations, which doesn't seem very important. Certainly, it is a far...
The ICC held a hearing for Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, its first arrestee, today. He has a provisional defence counsel and will get a full hearing in June. According to the BBC, Lubanga is a rebel warlord leading a group battling rivals from the Lendu ethnic group, partly for control of large deposits of gold in the Democratic Republic of...
Kevin's post on the Iraqi-Al Qaeda relationship suggests that there is little evidence of a colloborative relationship in the recently released Iraq files. This might or might not be true, but (because Opinio Juris is fair and balanced), we should also consider evidence from those files showing Saddam's Iraq had connections with, and perhaps plans to work with,...
A group of NGOs including Amnesty International and Oxfam have started a "Control Arms Campaign" to lobby for tougher international arms control. They have issued a report today complaining about the failure of countries to abide by international arms embargoes against a variety of countries. They are also calling for an international treaty to obligate countries to codify...
The U.S. is pulling almost all of its military forces out of Iceland. This is not exactly big news, except perhaps in Iceland itself, which has no other military force. Indeed, the Iceland government has actually been trying to convince the U.S. military to stay, but the U.S. (rightly, I think) has decided that Iceland is no longer...
With some fanfare, the President has released a revised National Security Strategy . The major papers and the media are already dissecting the strategy with each focusing on a different part (e.g. the BBC highlighting the commitment to preemptive attacks while the NYT focusing on the document's attention on Iran as the single greatest threat. The document obviously has no...
