French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner calls in the Financial Times for a tax on global financial transactions as a means of funding the currently moribund UN Millennium Development Goals. It is an idea that has been floated repeatedly since the 1990s - sometimes with the emphasis on the tax itself as a means of deliberately slowing down and making more...
In case you were curious about the text of the letter sent by former directors of the CIA to President Obama urging him to reverse the AG's decision to appoint a prosecutor to investigate various CIA activities under the Bush administration, RCP has posted a pdf of the text. It is short and, unsurprisingly, rests on the names of the...
IntLawGrrls has a new project going titled, Experts at Law. Here's how they describe it: Organized by field of expertise, this series of posts aims to provide easily accessible information to conference organizers, media, and others who seek expert opinions on a variety of subjects while ensuring gender balance. The list below provides institutional affiliations for, as well as links to,...
The Trial Chamber in Karadzic has instructed the prosecution to reduce the scope of its indictment from monstrous and completely unworkable to somewhat less monstrous and somewhat less completely unworkable. The result? Victims groups burning judges and prosecutors (and my client) in effigy and threatening not to cooperate with the prosecution: Several hundred members of victims' associations have protested in front...
Paula Schriefer of Freedom House makes a compelling argument about the central failings of the UN Human Rights Council and how they can be overcome in this piece over at Foreign Policy. It is not, as many argue, the mere presence of bad actors on the Council or the ability of those states and their friends to run the place...
The Crimes of War site has noted that Florence Hartmann has been convicted in the ICTY: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia this week convicted a former official of contempt of court for disclosing the contents and effect of two confidential Appeals Chamber decisions. The Court found that Florence Hartmann, a French journalist and former spokesperson for the Prosecutor,...
Two former U.S. military commanders took on the former VP for his ongoing support of torture in this scathing op-ed in last week's Miami Herald. Generals Krulak and Hoar took this unusual step because they felt "duty-bound" to "repudiate his [Cheney's] dangerous ideas." Hat tip to Tom Ricks, who calls it "the best article I read on the 8th...
Charlie Savage has a piece in today's NY Times on the OLC's recent memo advising the State Department that it may ignore congressional constraints attached to the 2009 foreign appropriations bill that purport to prohibit U.S. diplomats from attending meetings led by officials from states designated as state sponsors of terrorism on the ground that such constraints unconstitutionally limit...
The U.S. officially took its seat at the UN Human Rights Council on Monday. Yes, it will be joining a deeply flawed institution that, under its prior form as the HR Commission included in its membership Zimbabwe and Sudan* --hardly paragons of human rights compliance. But it is better for the U.S. to be inside the institution, working to bring...
I imagine there will be much gnashing of teeth over the Goldstone Commission's report -- the meme of the day seems to be that because the Commission was on a fact-finding mission, it wasn't permitted to infer from those facts that war crimes or crimes against humanity were committed -- but this attack deserves special mention: Avi Bell, a professor of...
You can find all 574 pages of it here. From the press release: The UN Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone on Tuesday released its long-awaited report on the Gaza conflict, in which it concluded there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed...
Although often critical of Israel, I have always been sympathetic to Israeli claims that the UN Human Rights Council has deliberately appointed individuals to investigate conditions in the Palestinian territories who were either actually biased against Israel or who at least could not avoid the appearance of bias. I was completely opposed, for example, to the HRC's decision to appoint...
