In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

03 Apr

Genocide is one of those phrases with both highly potent political ramifications as well as highly complicated legal requirements.  These two characteristics, GUÉNAËL METTRAUX argues in the IHT, make the obsessive focus on whether something is or is not a genocide (Armenia? Srebenica?) a largely hopeless and unhelpful exercise for historical events. The very proposition that legal concepts such as genocide could...

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03 Apr

I love Foreign Policy's blog, Passport.  Along with Democracy Arsenal, it's one of the two best blogs for analysis of (duh) US foreign policy.  Which is why I was shocked to read a recent post by Andrew Swift entitled "Is Karl Rove a War Criminal?", because Swift's analysis would make a first-year law student blush in embarrassment.  Here is how...

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03 Apr

I don't know if I buy this article's suggestion that the various Catholic Church priest-pedophile scandals amount to a "crime against humanity" under international law, but I do think the Pope's right to "head of state" immunity under international law is a tough question.  In the U.S., the Pope has been granted head of state immunity (thanks to President Bush...

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02 Apr

When the ICC Pre-Trial Chamber approved the Prosecutor's request for authority to investigate alleged "crimes against humanity" in Kenya, I didn't notice this long and powerful dissenting opinion (around p. 84) by one of the judges (Hans-Peter Kaul).  The standard for authorizing an investigation is pretty easy to satisfy (at least it sounds that way to me), so the dissent...

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01 Apr

Not a funny April Fool's Day joke, although it sort of sounds like one. Any of our readers in Coffs Harbour, NSW, please check out your window and give the Australian Federal Police a hand. THE Australian Federal Police are continuing to frantically search for an Australian accused of war crimes, after a five-year legal battle ended with the High Court...

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01 Apr

Interesting discussion of innovative ways to deal with Haiti's long-term problems.  Haiti is very close to a failed state. So it's time to think big. Here are four out of the box choices:  1) A New Haitian Constitution; 2) UN Trusteeship; 3) U.S. Protectorate; 4) U.S. annexation and status as a territory.  Read the whole article. I actually think that...

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01 Apr

This is not surprising, although I doubt they have much a legal basis to resist enforcement. Ecuadorean officials are rejecting an international arbitration tribunal's ruling that it violated international law and must pay $700 million to the ChevronCorp. President Rafael Correa's administration is analyzing options for appeal under national and international law, Attorney General Diego Garcia said in a statement Wednesday. "This new effort...

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01 Apr

Add another African case to the ICC's docket. The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, has given its prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo the green light to investigate the role of senior politicians in Kenya's post-election violence that killed 1,300 Kenyans in 2008. The decision allows Mr. Ocampo to take the next step, which would be passing down indictments against senior Kenyan politicians, some...

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31 Mar

There is an old adage that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.  The rejoinder is that a liberal is a conservative who has been indicted.  Speaking of which, an intriguing development in the case of the Christian terrorists: All members of the anti-government Hutaree group, who wanted to start a violent revolution against the government...

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31 Mar

NGO Monitor loves to criticize progressive NGOs for a lack of transparency concerning their funding.  A recent report, for example, predictably attacks Human Rights Watch for not identifying all of its donors, particularly those at last year's fundraising event in Saudi Arabia: HRW publishes the names and amounts provided by some of its donors, but others remain hidden. Although HRW...

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