Jeremy Waldron continues to do incredibly interesting philosophical work on questions surrounding torture. He recently posted a short, accessible piece on moral absolutes that is a joy to read. What I love about the piece is that he embraces the absolute prohibition against torture, but then is brutally honest about how hard it is to defend that position....
I want to draw readers attention (if they haven't already seen it) to this excellent discussion of the international legality of the Bin Laden killing by Alon Margalit over at EJIL Talk!. It is particularly instructive for Americans to get a better sense of the non-US views on the Bin Laden killing. It notes that the nearly uniform State support for...
Perhaps. At least they are getting their waterskis on. According to Politico, Amnesty International has filed a 1,000 page memorandum demanding that Canadian authorities arrest or extradite former U.S. President George W. Bush. “Canada is required by its international obligations to arrest and prosecute former President Bush given his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture,” Susan Lee, Americas Director...
Interesting story out of Charlotte, N.C. about the family of Samir Khan, one of the U.S. citizens killed in the drone attack on Awlaki last week. (h/t Michael Rubin) An official from the U.S. State Department has called the Charlotte family of al-Qaida propagandist Samir Khan to offer the government's condolences on his death in a U.S. drone attack last week...
I appreciate Mike taking the time to respond. I'll address his various criticisms in separate posts; here I want to focus on the amicus brief's claim (p. 14) that Sosa requires a norm applies in ATS litigation only if it has "undisputed international acceptance," a standard that is satisfied only if (p. 7) "the defendant’s alleged conduct [is] universally recognized...
In a prior post, I responded to some of Kevin Heller’s criticism of the professors' amicus brief recently filed in the Nestle ATS case. Specifically, that post addressed issues arising from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Here I’ll take up Kevin’s criticism based on rulings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). To frame the...
Thanks to Kevin Heller for his thoughts on the professors’ amicus brief in Doe v. Nestle USA, Inc., and to Opinio Juris for affording me this opportunity to respond. I should say at the outset that I’m making this response only in my personal capacity, not on behalf of any litigant or amicus. While I appreciate the passion Kevin brings to...
John Yoo, not surprisingly, has some thoughts on the leaked secret memo on Awlaki.(sorry forgot to link his full post earlier). Let’s give partial credit where it is due. Apparently the Obama administration argues that al-Awlaki was a legitimate target because he is a member of an enemy engaged in hostile conduct against the United States. At least Obama has figured...
UCLA Law School's Sanela Daniela Jenkins Human Rights Project has a special joint online forum with the ICC office of the prosecutor, which is currently running commentary on the question of prevention, and how the ICC can maximize its crime prevention impact. It features contributions from a variety of experts from a variety of perspectives - Tomer Broude, Bill Burke-White,...
Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of Homeland Security during the Bush Administration, has this very powerful and clear explanation of how legal rules are weakening U.S. defenses against a cyber attack. Note the slam on using international law rules to regulate cyber war. (h/t Vincent Vitowsky). Across the federal government, lawyers are tying themselves in knots of legalese. Military lawyers are trying...
Revisiting the Peace-Justice Debate in northern Uganda
Perhaps no nation has witnessed so impassioned a debate on the relationship between peace and international criminal justice as Uganda. Northern Uganda, a case many believed the Court could “cut its teeth” on, sparked a fierce discussion, popularly referred to as the “peace versus justice debate”. This debate not only animated domestic politics but also the international discourse grappling with the effects of pursuing international criminal justice on the establishment of peace. The debate on the relationship between peace and justice largely remains harshly dichotomous and black-and-white. Either international criminal justice fundamentally disrupts the potential for creating peace or it is an absolute necessity for it. The attempted middle-ground which calls the peace-justice dichotomy “false” rarely offers any explanation as to why it's false. Northern Uganda may be our best opportunity to move beyond the rigidity of the peace versus justice debate. This post is an attempt to explain why this is the case by making two broad arguments: first, that the effects of the ICC on narratives regarding the dynamics and causes of conflict has profound implications on attitudes towards the relationship between peace and justice; and second, that the effects of the ICC on pre-negotiation dynamics as well as on negotiations themselves are distinct and should be analyzed as such.Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat. “Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”By asserting that “we’re” creating it, this is a claim that there is an arms race among states over military drones, and that it is a consequence of the US creating the technology and deploying it — and then, beyond the technology, changing the normative legal and moral rules in the international community about using it across borders. In effect, the combination of those two, technological and normative, forces other countries in strategic competition with the US to follow suit. It sounds like it must be true. But is it? There are a number of reasons to doubt that moves by other countries are an arms race in the sense that the US “created” it or could have stopped it, or that something different would have happened had the US not pursued the technology or not used it in the ways it has against non-state terrorist actors. Here are a couple of quick reasons why I don’t find this thesis very persuasive, and what I think the real “arms race” surrounding drones will be.
