In today's Washington Post, Curtis Bradley and Jack Goldsmith have an editorial attacking the recent refusal of a federal judge to grant a motion to dismiss in Khulumani v. Barclays National Bank Ltd, the ATS lawsuit brought by victims of apartheid against 23 corporations who did business with the South African government during the apartheid era. It's a remarkably unpersuasive...
More evidence that the CIA interrogators did not rely in good faith on the OLC memos: Bradbury's 30 May 2005 memo acknowledges (p. 37) that the CIA Inspector General's report found that the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah 83 times in August 2002. That regime far surpasses the CIA's own internal guidelines...
As we all know, the ICC does not have jurisdiction over the acts of torture committed by the CIA at Guantanamo Bay -- neither the US nor Cuba is a member of the Court. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that it would be far easier to prosecute the CIA interrogators at the ICC than in the US, because there is...
I'm not particularly surprised, but I'm still disappointed. Israel's ostensible justification is that the UNHRC resolution that created the fact-finding mission is biased, because it only asked Goldstone to investigate Israeli war crimes. That was a ridiculous move on the UNHRC's part, to be sure -- but one of the very first things Goldstone did was to make...
I am grateful to Mr. Li and Professor Wang for their thoughtful comments and am flattered by their praise. The very fact that a lawyer and a law professor speak of their criminal justice system with such insight and candor highlights one of the most laudatory aspects of Taiwan’s legal reform project: A transparent, open debate over the best path...
[Jaw-perng Wang is Professor of Law at National Taiwan University] I am very impressed that a foreign scholar, especially a common-law trained one, could have a precise picture of Taiwan’s criminal procedure and its history and recent reforms. Without spending tremendous time and effort, an article that accurately and meticulously reports Taiwan’s criminal procedure, like this one, could not possibly be...
[Nigel Li is a prominent lawyer and legal scholar in Taiwan] Professor Lewis' article comes timely as a 10-year review of the half-baked criminal procedure reforms in Taiwan, particularly in a vacuum of rigorous academic attention to an ambitious attempt to transplant the common-law adversarial system to a soil of civil-law inquisitorial adjudication by a rising young democracy seeking a new...
[Margaret K. Lewis is a Senior Research Fellow at NYU Law School's U.S.-Asia Law Institute.] Thank you to the editors of the Virginia Journal of International Law and to Opinio Juris for providing this forum. My article grew out of work on legal reforms in Mainland China, which led to a cross-Strait project. As I learned more about Taiwan’s criminal justice...
I argued below that "good faith reliance" on OLC opinions does not justify promising CIA interrogators that they will not be prosecuted for their criminal acts. With regard to waterboarding, it is important to note that it seems clear some of the interrogators cannot even argue good faith reliance. Consider the following footnote from Bradbury's May 10, 2005, memo, discussing...
Having criticized Obama somewhat regularly as of late, it's important to give him partial credit where partial credit is due -- he has released the four OLC torture memos with a minimum of redaction. You can find the memos here. That could not have been an easy decision, given the CIA's opposition to having its systematic criminality (further) exposed. Nevertheless, Obama...
I mentioned a couple of days ago that the case against the Bush Six was likely to go forward. Unfortunately, rumors of the case's survival turn out to be somewhat exaggerated: Spain's attorney general said he'll seek dismissal of an investigation of Bush administration officials for alleged torture of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prisoners. Attorney General Candido Conde-Pumpido said Thursday the claim against...
I very much appreciate the thoughtful commentary of Professors J.B. Ruhl and Nathan Sayre on my article. They are engaged in tremendously interesting thinking on questions of environmental scale and governance, and I find their comments insightful. I agree with both of them that this article opens further research questions about what diagonals are, how they have been constituted over...
