Julian's latest snide swipe at the ICC focuses on Bashir's visit to Kenya, which he describes as a "slap in the face to the ICC Prosecutor and the defenders of the Bashir arrest warrant." Not surprisingly, Julian conveniently fails to mention the details of Bashir's visit: Sudanese President Omar al Bashir curiously flew in through Nairobi’s Wilson Airport, and ...
So says a draft UN report that studied events in the Congo between 1993 and 2008: An exhaustive U.N. investigation into the history of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo has concluded that the Rwandan military and its allies carried out hundreds of large-scale killings of ethnic Hutu refugees during the 1990s that amounted to war crimes,...
Our friend and OJ guest contributor Professor Greg Gordon passes along the following call for papers -- for international law scholars and other subject areas -- for the Central Law Schools Association 2010 meeting. Full announcement after the jump: The Central States Law Schools Association 2010 conference will be held September 24 and 25, 2010, in Grand Forks, North Dakota,...
Lots of ironies in this story about Kenya hosting Sudan's President Bashir at a ceremony celebrating the establishment of its new "U.S.-style" Constitution. NAIROBI, Kenya - Kenya's president signed a new constitution into law Friday that institutes a U.S.-style system of checks and balances and has been hailed as the most significant political event since Kenya's independence nearly a half century...
It's not often that you run into a story that combines international arbitration, Kremlin politics, post-Soviet autocrats, utopian urban projects, transnational networks, electoral politics, and chess. So, read on...
The report is here. I have neither the time nor the stomach to fully engage with it, but I couldn't let paragraph 82 pass without comment: 82. The United States is currently at war with Al Qaeda and its associated forces. President Obama has made clear that the United States is fully committed to complying with the Constitution and with all...
So reports Reuters: The Dutch prosecutor's office said on Friday it would look into whether Dutch peacekeeping soldiers should face criminal charges over the 1995 massacre in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. About 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed at Srebrenica after Bosnian Serb forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave where Dutch troops were ...
OK, that's not exactly the title of this piece at Huffington Post, but the observations from Gary Arndt about Americans and the World sound true to me. Arndt has been traveling around the world since 2007, for no particular reason (see his travel blog here and yes, I'm very jealous of his life). Here are some my favorites from his...
I wanted to flag for interested readers an upcoming event at the British Institute of International & Comparative Law (BIICL). On September 10, BIICL will host its Fifteenth Investment Treaty Forum, with a focus on recent developments in international arbitration procedure. Topics will include disclosure of evidence, state privilege, transparency of hearings, and whether or not investment arbitration is (or should be) different from...
Last month the Second Circuit issued a remarkable ruling that threatens to upend the longstanding rule of successor state liability for the credit obligations of predecessor states. It did so by ruling that the automatic assumption of liability of sovereign debt of the predecessor state under international law is not a “commercial activity” within the meaning of the FSIA....
In the interests of being fair and balanced (as always!), I thought I would post on this good response by David Bosco to Jeremy Rabkin's recent essay on the International Criminal Court in The Weekly Standard (which I discussed here). Although I am not totally convinced by it, I think Bosco offers the best possible defense of the ICC that would...
[caption id="attachment_13148" align="alignright" width="150" caption=" "][/caption] The WSJ has an article on the U.S. Defense Department's push for a criminal prosecution of Wikileaks for releasing U.S. government documents on the Afghanistan war. Several officials said the Defense and Justice departments were now exploring legal options for prosecuting Mr. Assange and others involved on grounds they encouraged the theft of government property. Bringing a case...
