Bobby Chesney and Human Rights First's Daphne Eviatar debate the extent to which the ICCPR applies in Afghanistan and, in important matters, in regimes of IHL. The back and forth at Lawfare is well worth reading. Let me be distressingly candid. This is an area in which I find it difficult to get "inside" the legal debate because I find it...
We already knew that Muammar scion Saif Gaddafi had written a dissertation at LSE entitled “The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions: From Soft Power to Collective Decision Making?” But I didn't know that it was slated to be published by Oxford University Press. This at HuffPo from Ben Barber (who, ahem, knows something about...
"Libya"and "humanitarian intervention" are being used more and more often in the same sentence. Over at Ratio Juris, Patrick O'Donnell has a round-up of blog posts and opinion pieces concerning humanitarian intervention and the situation in Libya. Patrick's post is especially helpful for anyone trying to get up to speed on this issue as it includes a bibliography on humanitarian intervention, more...
In case any one finds themselves in/around Philadelphia on March 5, this event may be of interest: Supreme Court litigators Carter G. Phillips and Kannon Shanmugam will argue a case based on hypothetical federal legislation that exempts police from issuing Miranda warnings to individuals suspected of terrorism. A jury of nine distinguished judges will decide if such legislation can withstand constitutional...
Orin Kerr is the Fourth Amendment scholar that I definitely am not, so I read with interest his Volokh post this morning on Ashcroft v. Al-Kidd, which the Supreme Court will be hearing next week. He says it is a strange case for a couple of reasons. The two basic issues in the case are: First, whether using the material witness...
David Bernstein and NGO Monitor have worked themselves into a lather about Human Rights Watch's decision to appoint Shawan Jabarin, the head of Al-Haq, a leading Palestinian human-rights group, to its Mideast Advisory Board. In support of their ire, they cite decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court that have concluded that Jabarin is also an official in the Popular Front...
Cross-posted at Balkinization It felt like a lively discussion Friday at the panel hosted by American University scholar Dan Marcus on “Guantanamo Detainees – What Next?” (Many thanks to Ken for plugging it earlier in the week. I take it the session will at some point be available among webcasts on the law school website.) Jack Goldsmith gave a keynote...
Max du Plessis and Christopher Gevers, ICC experts who teach at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, have launched a new blog, War and Law. The blog focuses on international criminal justice from an African perspective, making it a must-read for anyone interested in international criminal law. Recent posts discuss Kenya's attempts to amend Article 16 of the Rome...
I'm off to Tokyo for a week, but before I go, wanted to flag a really interesting looking upcoming conference at Fordham Law School. It's entitled, Cyber Attacks: International Cybersecurity in the 21st Century and will take place next Friday, February 25, 2011. The program is free, subject to registration (see here). The line-up looks great too: 9:00am–9:30am Registration 09:30am–10:00am Welcome 10:00am–11:45am Cyber Attacks and the Law of Armed Conflict Moderator: Prof....
A proposition at the center of much international development work in the past decade or more has been the importance of institutions - whether one talks about "good governance" or the "rule of law" or other terms referring to institutions of governance in a society that permit stability across time. The claim has always seemed to engage the happy coincidence...
Yes, after nearly nine years of detention in Guantanamo, Noor Uthan Muhammed has pleaded guilty to two non-existent war crimes. As the ACLU notes in its post on the plea, although the court reporter faithfully translated each time he said "yes" to whether he understood what he was doing, the reporter did not translate the only full sentence Muhammed uttered:...
According to the Jerusalem Post, five purchasers of Jimmy Carter's new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid have filed a $5 million lawsuit in federal court in New York against Carter and Simon & Schuster, the book's publisher. The lawsuit alleges that the book violates New York consumer-protection laws by claiming to be a work of non-fiction (my emphasis): The five...
