With so many failed terrorism prosecutions to cover — see, for example, here, here, and here — the media can be forgiven for overlooking one here or there. Still, it's a shame that the Bush administration's most recent failure, the baseless prosecution of Dr. Steven Kurtz on bioterror charges, has not received more attention. It's an ugly story. Kurtz,...
I know it's not international law, but this site is too cool not to mention: Just enter your address and it will calculate your "Walk Score" — how walkable your neighborhood is. It even maps all the interesting businesses that are nearby. I entered my old address in Athens, Georgia, and my walk score was 75, walkable enough not...
My colleagues have often discussed the dangers of globalization in these pages. Nevertheless, I fear they have overlooked one of the most pernicious: embarrassing car names. There are 2,261 different written languages in the world, essentially guaranteeing that at least some car names will mean something untoward in one of them. Witness the Ford Pinto, Portuguese...
Over at National Security Advisors, our colleague Dave Glazier has a superb post on whether the Gitmo defense attorneys are responsible for the ills of the military commissions, as the Wall Street Journal's far-right editorial page seems to believe. Here's the intro:The Wall Street Journal published a scathing editorial today blasting the military and civilian defense attorneys it portrays...
They number at least 12,000,000, though a precise count is impossible because many governments refuse to consider them a legitimate category for census purposes. They suffer serious and widespread employment discrimination, especially their women, leading to unemployment rates often 6-8 times greater than the countries in which they live. They are sequestered in dangerous, environmentally-degraded slums,...
The California Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage wasn't the only good human-rights news yesterday. Also exciting is the Court of Arbitration for Sport's decision to allow Oscar Pistorius, a double-amputee sprinter, to compete for a place in the Beijing Olympics:The Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that the 21-year-old South African is eligible to race against able-bodied...
I had contemplated weighing in on commentators' unfortunate tendency to equate the Responsibility to Protect doctrine with humanitarian invasion, but John Boonstra at UN Dispatch beat me to it. Here's a snippet:First, by and large, the R2P doctrine has been misunderstood or misrepresented in calls to "invade" Burma. R2P is often implied to boil down to a simple equation:...
I have blogged from time to time about the trial of Alberto Fujimori, the former President of Peru. Interested readers now have a new — and far better — source of information about the trial: Fujimori on Trial, a new bilingual Spanish/English blog sponsored by the Praxis Institute for Social Justice. Here is the blog's self-description:Praxis Institute for...
Oxford University Press has just published my friend Nils Melzer's book Targeted Killing in International Law. Here is the description from the Oxford website:A comprehensive analysis into the lawfulness of state-sponsored targeted killings under international human rights and humanitarian law, this book examines treaties, custom and general principles of law to determine the normative paradigms which govern the intentional...
I'm sorry, I just can't let this one go:Picture, if you will, a tree-lined plaza in Baghdad's International Village, flanked by fashion boutiques, swanky cafes, and shiny glass office towers. Nearby a golf course nestles agreeably, where a chip over the water to the final green is but a prelude to cocktails in the club house and a soothing massage...
Stories like this cause barely a ripple of controversy:Girls may be given free access to the emergency contraceptive pill at their local Auckland pharmacies in a bid to reduce teen pregnancies and abortions. The medicine can already be sold by many pharmacists without a doctor's prescription, including to girls without parental consent. An Auckland District Health Board committee will tomorrow consider a...
How desperate is the ICTR to fulfill its completion strategy by dumping cases on Rwanda? Enough to disavow the NGO on which it has relied on for nearly 14 years:The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) when presenting last week his motion in favour of transfer of genocide accused Yusuf Munyakazi to Rwanda, clearly distanced himself...
