In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

17 Mar

Duke Law School's Program in Public Law recently started a new blog, Executive Watch.  According to the Duke Press release, it will feature "news stories and commentary about executive-branch actions, including executive orders, presidential memos, and signing statements."  The blog may be of interest to our readers as, in addition to issues of domestic authority, it will address perennial topics in U.S. foreign...

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17 Mar

A reader has left a comment to my previous post in which he alleges that Alex tipped off Bashir that the OPT was going to seek his arrest and speculates that Alex might have promised Bashir to oppose the genocide charges. I have reluctantly left the comment up, because I don't believe that it is my role as a blogger to...

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15 Mar

Paul Krugman's Friday column has to weigh heavily on anyone with a 7-year-old boy. The parallels are clear, at least on the back end. Krugman is hardly the first to play the Norman Angell card. Angell's ill-timed proclamation of the end of war in the run-up to the Guns of August figures prominently in the opening chapter...

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14 Mar

In public, Sudanese government officials have uniformly defended Bashir against the supposed depredations of the ICC.  According to the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, however, they tell a different story in private: A minister with the president’s National Congress Party, NCP, said that members were left reeling by the announcement of an arrest warrant issued against Bashir by ICC judges...

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13 Mar

The Obama Administration selected Friday afternoon (go figure) to release its whammy of a brief on the standard it believes should govern the President’s authority to hold the current Guantanamo detainees. Here’s the key paragraph: The President has the authority to detain persons that the President determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, and...

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13 Mar

I am happy to report -- though some readers will no doubt be unhappy to hear -- that the OTP has requested leave to appeal the Pre-Trial Chamber's decision on the genocide charges.  The appeal cites my recent post on the majority's misunderstanding of the "reasonable grounds" standard, which is both a tremendous honor and a testament to the ever-increasing...

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12 Mar

Last month, I wrote a post about the upcoming Eurovision song competition and European politics. I wanted to point out that the competition will be hosted by (and televised from) Moscow and that the Georgian entry was going to sing a disco song that teases Vladimir Putin called, ahem, "We Don't Wanna Put In." See it performed here.   Anyway, in the final paragraph I...

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12 Mar

I pass along the following call for panels from the co-chairs of American Branch of the International Law Association's International Law Weekend 2009. The theme, "Challenges to Transnational Governance," is quite timely.  I encourage OJ readers to submit proposals and to attend what promises to be a great event. On October 22-24, 2009, the American Branch of the International Law Association...

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11 Mar

When we think of prosecuting perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide I would suspect that the work of the ICTR immediately comes to mind. That is unfortunate, because fewer than one percent of all Rwandan genocide trials are conducted by the ICTR. It is the local “gacaca” courts where almost all the prosecutions are held, with the ICTR and...

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11 Mar

I want to follow up briefly on Kevin's post earlier re Darfur and responsibility to protect.  Being located in Washington and having a think tank connection - Hoover - as well as a law professor job, I serve on various task forces on international law and foreign policy issues.  I was one of the experts on the Gingrich-Mitchell task force...

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