You see it in nearly every movie about WW II: one the one side, you have the evil Nazi fanatics, Hitler and Goering and the like; on the other side, you have Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, a gifted tank commander far removed from the genocidal machinations at Wannsee. Think Patton. As it turns out, the truth is a bit...
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC Prosecutor, announced today that he is opening a formal investigation into the situation in the Central African Republic. The Prosecutor's decision marks the first time that the Court has investigated a situation in which sexual crimes against women outnumber — and significantly outnumber — killings:The Office has analysed allegations of serious crimes perpetrated in CAR,...
A little over a year ago, I noted that a Dutch court had sentenced Frans van Anraat, a chemicals dealer, to 15 years in prison for selling Iraq a key component of the mustard gas that Saddam used against the Kurds during the Anfal campaign. Last week, a Dutch appeals court upheld van Anraat's conviction for complicity in war...
Extremely disturbing news out of Rwanda: a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group has been arrested after being accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide by a local gacaca court:Francois-Xavier Byuma, vice-president of the board of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights ["Turengere Abana"], was detained last week in Kigali and taken Wednesday to...
Excellent news for historians researching the Holocaust: the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, which oversees a massive archive of Nazi documents in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has voted to begin distributing the documents electronically to member states:The archive contains Nazi records on the arrest, transportation, incarceration, forced labor and deaths of millions of people from the year the...
At the risk of committing the post hoc fallacy, it is interesting to note that less than a week after the ICC issued its first arrest warrants related to the situation in Darfur, Rolls-Royce has announced that it will no longer do business in the Sudan:Rolls, which supplies engines to oil firms in the country, said it would "progressively withdraw"...
President Bush has always insisted that he only went to war with Iraq as a last resort, in response to Saddam's refusal to disarm:"Of course, I haven’t made up my mind we’re going to war with Iraq." [10/1/02] "You said we’re headed to war in Iraq — I don’t know why you say that. I hope we’re not headed to war...
In a shameful day for British criminal justice, David Keogh and Leo O'Connor have been convicted of violating Britain's Official Secrets Act for leaking a confidential memorandum between Bush and Blair that quotes a threat by Bush to bomb Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar:The memo was a note of a meeting between US President George Bush and the British Prime...
It began with a bang — the explosion of an airplane with 73 innocent lives aboard — and ends with a whimper: on Tuesday, citing the "universal sense of justice," U.S. district judge Kathleen Cardone threw out the false-statement charges against Luis Posada Carriles, ordered his electronic bracelet removed, and watched him walk out of the courtroom a free man....
I want to highly recommend my friend and colleague Mark Drumbl's new book Atrocity, Punishment, and International Law, which was just published by Cambridge University Press. The book defends two interrelated claims: (1) there is a fundamental difference between the “extraordinary” crimes that are punished at the international level (genocide, crimes against humanity, etc.) and the “ordinary” crimes that are punished...
How do you know when your Iraq policy has failed? When a Republican congressman defends it by quoting a general who not only fought for the Confederacy, but also founded the Ku Klux Klan:A Texas Republican Congressman invoked a founding Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in a floor speech he delivered yesterday in support of the Iraq...
ABC News is reporting that the U.S. Navy recently recalled an openly gay sailor to active duty:Petty Officer 2nd Class Jason Knight says the U.S. Navy knew he was gay, discharged him after he admitted his sexuality, and then recalled him last year to serve in the Middle East. The Navy disputes that Knight was ever officially known by the Pentagon...
