My friend Olympia Bekou at the University of Nottingham has asked me to post the following conference announcement:The International Criminal Court and the State 9th November 2007 The Human Rights Law Centre and Methods and Data Institute at the University of Nottingham announce a multi-disciplinary conference entitled 'The International Criminal Court and the State'. As one of the four partners to the...
It's been a difficult week for the global campaign to abolish the death penalty. First, Afghanistan executed 15 prisoners, ending a three year moratorium on executions:The mass execution took place Sunday evening according to Afghan law, which calls for condemned prisoners to be shot to death, said Abdul Salam Ismat, the prisons chief. During the 1996-2001 rule of Afghanistan's hard-line...
Here is the Nobel Committee's explanation of the award, which Gore shares with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds. Extensive climate changes may alter and threaten the living conditions of much of mankind. They may induce large-scale...
Meet Ann Coulter, Fox News media darling, best-selling author, syndicated columnist — and raving anti-Semite. From an exchange with Donny Deutsch on CNBC: DEUTSCH: Let me ask you a question. We're going to get off strengths and weakness for a second. If you had your way, and all of your — forget that any of them...
Further to Julian's comments on Medellin, make sure to check out this post on the Volokh Conspiracy explaining how, if Medellin wins, Hillary Clinton and the "World Court" ("ICJ" doesn't sound scary enough) could conspire to repeal the Second Amendment. ...
40 of 55 inmates in a Tanzanian prison awaiting trial at the ICTR have gone on a hunger strike to protest the scheduled transfer of three cases to Rwanda. According to their signed statement, the inmates do not believe that the Rwandan judicial system will provide the defendants with a fair trial:On 7 September, the ICTR prosecutor requested that...
Yes, there would indeed be peace in the Sudan if only the ICC would quit demanding accountability for government officials: The town belongs to the only Darfur rebel faction to sign a 2006 peace deal with the Sudanese government. Yet yesterday Sudanese government troops and allied militia attacked Muhajiriya, burning half of the town to the ground in a "stab in the...
YouTube is everywhere. Politicians use it for campaign ads. Bands use it to promote their new music. I use it to keep abreast of The Colbert Report, which is shamefully absent from New Zealand television. And now international prosecutors are using it to collect evidence:Prosecutors in the case against former Bosnian army chief Rasim Delic this...
Peter recently criticized the new U.S. test for naturalization, arguing that instead of tinkering with the questions, it would be better "to drop the test altogether and recognize the fading distinctiveness of the national community." Wise words — ones regrettably ignored by Australia's new citizenship test, which is being widely described as "stupid," "xenophobic," and "racist":Prospective Australian citizens will...
A number of progressive bloggers are having fun with Michael Medved's new column, "Six Inconvenient Truths about the U.S. and Slavery." Much of the criticism of the right-wing radio host's column has focused on the following passage, in which Medved seems to argue that the real victims of the slave trade were the slave traders themselves, who lost much...
A few weeks ago, I mentioned my colleague John Ip's new essay "Comparative Perspectives on the Detention of Terrorist Suspects," which recently appeared in a symposium issue (edited by our colleague Tung Yin) of Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems. John's essay is now available on SSRN. Here is a snippet of the abstract:This article examines the different approaches...
I have posted a substantially revised version of my essay "Mistake of Legal Element, the Common Law, and Article 32 of the Rome Statute: A Critical Analysis" on SSRN. The essay is now forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice. Here is the abstract:Article 32(2) of the Rome Statute provides that "[a] mistake of law may...
