Saturday was the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Tens of thousands of Japanese thronged Peace Park in downtown Hiroshima to commemorate the attack, which killed nearly 140,000 people. From all accounts, the ceremony was deeply moving, a tribute to the need to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all: During the ceremony, children dressed in black...
An Argentine court has sentenced a former policeman to 25 years imprisonment for "disappearing" a couple and abducting their child in 1978, during Argentina's "Dirty War": A federal court in Buenos Aires sentenced Julio Héctor Simón to 25 years in prison for the illegal arrest and torture of José Poblete Roa and Gertrudis Hlaczik de Poblete, a Chilean/Argentine couple who “disappeared”...
Law Professor Eugene Kontorovich has this thought-provoking op-ed in today's New York Sun arguing that the current proposal for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon violates a bedrock principle of international law: That nations cannot gain territory through the aggressive use of force. Here's an excerpt: The most surprising aspect of international proposals for a ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict is...
The AALS National Security Law Section is soliciting papers for the 2007 AALS meeting. The winning paper will be published in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy. The topic: “Prosecuting Leakers and Leakees: The End of National Security Muckraking?” For those of you interested, full details on submissions and the selection process can be found here. ...
Following up on Julian's post below, Uganda has announced that the ICC has agreed not to prosecute the five LRA leaders, including Joseph Kony, as long as the final agreement reached between the government and the LRA does not "condone impunity." Interestingly, Uganda also claims that it only initiated peace talks with the LRA because it could not find a partner...
The much-feared and much-despised Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has declared an immediate and unilateral cease-fire in its long-standing brutal civil war in Uganda. This is good news but it hasn't really solved the looming problem of ICC indictments of four top LRA leaders. Peace talks have apparently been stymied because of these ICC indictments and the ICC Prosecutor...
A report in favor of Transnistrian independence, supposedly written by a non-governmental organization, has been floating around. Take a look at what the Economist found. ...
I have recently been appointed the Book Review Editor -- along with Peter Ramsay, who is a member of the law faculty at LSE -- of the New Criminal Law Review, formerly published as the Buffalo Criminal Law Review. Here is the publisher's description of the journal's mission: Focused on examinations of crime and punishment in domestic, transnational, and international...
There is a fascinating story in the Jerusalem Post about the possibility of German soldiers defending Israel from Hezbollah attacks as part of a NATO force. Israel has recently signaled its openness to a NATO defense force, and Germany is obviously a leading member of NATO. Would it be a good idea to have German soldiers defending Israel? The...
Okay, it's official. We have lost the Iraq war: In an unannounced move, the House cafeteria has removed the terms "freedom fries" and "freedom toast" from its offerings, and has reverted to using the dishes' more common names, "french fries" and "french toast." Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH), who had implemented the change in 2003 in a fit of hollow...
The International Crisis Group has a new report on the risk of widespread violence in the Niger Delta called “The Swamps of Insurgency: Nigeria’s Delta Unrest.” The executive summary and full report download are available here. Following is a short description from the ICG:The Nigerian government and international oil corporations must change direction if they are to reduce...
Who knew that a single treaty-provision could get so much attention? Well, post-Hamdan, we’ve certainly seen a lot of discussion of whether the Supreme Court was correct to view Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions as applicable to the President’s military commissions. And, the debate continues as Congress weighs whether and how to accept the Supreme...
