There is an interesting discussion by Stephen Walt over at Foreign Policy on why academic writing is so bad. It is a subject academics are reluctant to discuss, yet there is no doubt that much of what passes as legal scholarship is dull, disagreeable, undigestable. Here's Walt's take: The first problem is that many academics (and especially younger...
Bangladesh has amended its war crimes statute to allow the retrial of cases from 1971 amid protests. Human Rights Watch is concerned that the amendments will threaten the legitimacy of the tribunal. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is proposing changes to its rules of procedure in order to strengthen the Inter-American system of human rights. ASIL has posted a new Insight on the International Law Issues in the Department...
[Michael W. Lewis is a Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University where he teaches International Law and the Law of War.] In his Hamdan opinion in 2006 Justice Stevens described the conflict between al Qaeda and the United States as a NIAC (his opinion did not address in any way the geographical scope of that NIAC). He then went on to measure the...
Calls for Papers After a successful first edition of Young Researchers Conference on Law, “Hëna e Plotë” Bedër University and University of Tirana are organizing the second edition of the series, Current Issues and Trends in International Law. Several topics will be covered and abstracts are due February 20, 2013. The conference Global Challenges in Public Private Partnerships: Cross-sectoral and Cross-disciplinary Solutions? will be held November...
My friend Jens Ohlin (Cornell) has just posted a very important article on SSRN entitled "Targeting and the Concept of Intent." Here is the abstract: International law generally prohibits military forces from intentionally targeting civilians; this is the principle of distinction. In contrast, unintended collateral damage is permissible unless the anticipated civilian deaths outweigh the expected military advantage of the strike;...
As far as I can tell, the Chinese government continues to pretend as if the Philippines' Law of the Sea arbitration claim doesn't exist. Articles like this one suggest the Philippines government continues to wait for some official or unofficial Chinese response. The February 22 deadline for China to appoint an arbitrator is fast approaching. There are obviously bigger things going...
I used to blog regularly about the Whale Wars, my name for the ongoing struggle between Japanese Whalers and those groups devoted to protecting whales. But I stopped almost three years ago when Australia filed its case against Japan in the ICJ, since nothing important seems to have happened since then. (Did we really need 22 months for written proceedings, when...
This week on Opinio Juris, Julian noticed the apparent truce between the American right and the ICC, but didn't go as far as calling it peace. Further on the ICC, Kevin pointed out a flagrant mistake at the Washington Times, and argued that the OTP was wrong in concluding that Libya is able to try Saif Gaddafi, because the Rome Statute does not consider a...
“Having the executive being the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner, all in one, is very contrary to the traditions and the laws of this country,” Senator Angus King Jr. of Maine said at the Brennan hearing. “If you’re planning a strike over a matter of days, weeks or months, there is an opportunity to at least go to some outside-of-the-executive-branch body, like the FISA Court, in a confidential and top-secret way, make the case that this American citizen is an enemy combatant.” Mr. Brennan said the idea was worthy of discussion, adding that the Obama administration had “wrestled with this.” Two other senators, Dianne Feinstein of California, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, and Ron Wyden of Oregon, also expressed interest. Even Robert Gates, a former C.I.A. director who was defense secretary under President George W. Bush and President Obama, said on CNN that such a judicial panel “would give the American people confidence” that a proper case had been made against an American citizen.The speed with which this idea has gained currency in Washington has, I fear, less to do with its merits and more to do with the intense attractiveness of the notion that there might be a neat procedural solution to a messy substantive problem. Alas, I don’t think it works that way. Here’s my thinking.
Okay, I admit it. The ICC is a failure. As Raj Kannappan insightfully notes at the Washington Times, its botched prosecution of Milosevic proves it: Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) was established with the promise of bringing to justice a host of international criminals, the Court has fallen short of delivering on that promise. Eleven years ago, on February 12, 2002, the...
Last May, I offered some critical thoughts on Opinio Juris about Charles Taylor's 50-year sentence at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. I have just finished a short essay (8,000 words) on Taylor's sentence that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice; you can find the essay on SSRN. Here is the introduction: On 30 May...
Legal philosopher and renowned scholar Ronald Dworkin passed away yesterday in London at the age of 81. Kenyan presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta asked the ICC to postpone his trial. A city court in Oslo, Norway convicted a Rwandan man for involvement in the 1994 Rwandan genocide and sentenced him to 21 years in prison. Amid peace talks, seven troops and an unidentified number...
