In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

21 Feb

Belgium has filed a request for an order of provisional measures from the International Court of Justice against Senegal for that country's failure to prosecute former Chad dictator Hissene Habre.  The press release describing Belgium's application lays out the legal theory, which boils down to: The Convention Against Torture and general international customary law.   Belgium contends that under conventional international law, "Senegal’s...

|
19 Feb

As this BBC report suggests, investigating war crimes in the Israel-Gaza conflict is a pretty much hopeless task because there is no single entity with the expertise, knowledge, and legitimacy to find out the "truth."  Any investigation, whether it is the UN or the ICC or Human Rights Watch, will be simply dismissed by the two sides as biased.  So...

|
19 Feb

While Georgia has already gotten a provisional meausres order from the ICJ and there is some movement in terms of restarting a diplomatic process after this summer's war between the two countries, the people of Georgia have decided to bring in the real arbiter of European politics: the Eurovision song competition. This yearly song competition is no stranger to high drama...

|
18 Feb

It’s not as though this is a new problem in American rights law. The expansion of defenses like qualified immunity for federal officials, the statutory restrictions on collateral federal review of state criminal convictions with constitutional infirmities, the stark limitations on common law constitutional remedies in the courts – all of these areas of doctrine accept the idea that...

|
17 Feb

This story in the continuing saga of Bowoto v. Chevron should give human rights litigants pause: Chevron Corp., which prevailed in a human-rights lawsuit seeking to hold it responsible for the shooting of Nigerian protesters at an oil platform, is seeking nearly $500,000 in legal costs from the villagers who brought the suit. Chevron's claim for reimbursement, filed in...

|
17 Feb

Last week I posted this excellent essay by Professor Kontorovich of Northwestern Law arguing that the anti-piracy efforts are unlikely to succeed as currently constituted.  One problem I've noted is that there is no obvious place to try captured pirates from Somalia.  The U.S. Navy's plan is to try pirates in nearby Kenya.  As this WSJ article suggests, this strategy is...

|
17 Feb

Last week I blogged about those incredibly irresponsible law professors who have tenure but do almost nothing to advance the institution. This week I want to turn the tables and talk about that delightful breed of law professors who are incredibly unselfish and manage to immeasurably improve the quality of the institution. Michael Lewis' wonderful article on the...

|
16 Feb

Normally, this is Brian Leiter's sort of thing.  But, I thought I'd flag for interested readers the news that Duke Law School has hired Larry Helfer away from Vanderbilt Law School.  The press release is here.  News of the hiring made me wonder if this move means "business as usual" for international law hiring in the United States this year, particularly among...

|
15 Feb

In an effort to put its sordid past behind it -- Nisour Square was so 2007 -- Blackwater Worldwide has announced that it shall henceforth be referred to not as "Blackwater," but as "Xe" -- pronounced like the letter "Z." But why stop there?  Why not go full Prince and replace the Blackwater name with a symbol that represents what the...

|
13 Feb

It sorrows me to report what I'm sure many of you have now learned, that Alison Des Forges, one of the great human rights workers and senior advisor to Human Rights Watch Africa Division, died in the plane crash of the Buffalo Continental Express flight on Thursday night, February 12, 2009.  I knew Alison back in the 1990s when we...

|