Author: Kevin Jon Heller

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...

Bush at the United Nations today:In Sudan, innocent civilians are suffering repression -- and in the Darfur region, many are losing their lives to genocide. America has responded with tough sanctions against those responsible for the violence. We've provided more than $2 billion in humanitarian and peacekeeping aid. I look forward to attending a Security Council meeting that will focus...

The Sudanese government has proven endlessly creative at resisting genuine progress toward peace, but I don't think this strategy is going to do it much good:The Sudanese government has begun filing a defamation lawsuit against Amnesty International for a report on torture against political prisoners in the country, the justice minister said Wednesday. The London-based rights group said in statement last...

The Guardian (UK) has a fascinating article today about opposition within the ICTY to the UN's purported intention to replace the chief ICTY prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, with Serge Brammertz, a deputy prosecutor at the ICC and the head of the UN commission investigating the murder of Lebanase Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. According to the article, the ICTY's...

As part of its completion strategy, the ICTR intends to transfer 41 cases to national jurisdictions. Most of the transfers will be to Rwanda, which recently eliminated the death penalty. The ICTR has already requested four such transfers: Ildephonse Hategekimana, Gaspard Kanyarukiga, Yussuf Munyakazi, and Fulgence Kayishema. The ICTR's efforts to transfer cases to other national jurisdictions, however, have...