My friend Dapo Akande has a superb post at EJIL: Talk! discussing whether the ICC could prosecute the use of chemical weapons by the government in Syria. I agree almost entirely with Dapo's analysis, but I do want to offer a couple of thoughts about his discussion of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: The argument that chemical weapons are...
[Dr. HJ van der Merwe is a Lecturer in Public Law Studies at the Law Faculty of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa] The degree to which states are able and willing to dynamically reflect international criminal norms within their domestic legal systems is crucial to the success of the project of international criminal justice. This is exemplified by...
Does anyone out there in the blogosphere have a copy of the Draft Report of the International Law Commission on the Work of Its Forty-Seventh Session, in which the ILC decided not to include drug trafficking in the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind? It is not available on the ILC section of the UN treaty...
[Sven Pfeiffer is an Associate Expert at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The views expressed in this post are those of the author, writing in his personal capacity, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.] National authorities are increasingly involved in the fight against impunity for perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against...
Criticism of the specific-direction requirement endorsed by the ICTY Appeals Chamber in Perišić has officially jumped the shark. According to James Stewart, the requirement would have required the British military court in Hamburg to acquit the two German businessmen who provided the Zyklon-B that the SS used to gas Jews in the death camps: In any event, let’s assume that specific direction...
[Tamsin Paige is an M.Phil (Law) Candidate at the Australian National University College of Law] Piracy originating from the coast of Somalia hit its peak in 2011, with 236 attacks occurring in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and the Somali region of the Indian Ocean in that year, according to the IMB’s 2012 piracy report. So far in 2013 the IMB...
It's been quite a month for the mainstream media. First, at FP.com, Elias Groll completely misstated the mens rea of the Espionage Act and refused to correct his mistake. (He obviously reads my tweets, because he re-tweeted a criticism I offered of a different article.) Then, at the Guardian, Owen Bowcott misrepresented the specific-direction requirement, eliding the distinction between aiding...
Just when I thought its position couldn't get more ridiculous, Libya argues the following -- presumably with a straight face -- in response to the defence's complaint that it is violating its obligation to surrender Saif to the ICC: It is clear, as Mr. Gaddafi noted in the Request, that the issue of admissibility – in particular ability to pursue a domestic...
Another person who should know better has misrepresented the ICTY's specific-direction requirement: Owen Bowcott, a legal correspondent for the Guardian. Here is the sub-headline of his new article on the impact of the Perisic judgment: Legal experts say proof that accused 'specifically directed' atrocities now required after tribunal acquits Serbian commanders. And here is the first paragraph of the article: Generals and politicians...
I want to welcome a promising new member of the international criminal law blogosphere -- Beyond the Hague. The blog is refreshingly international, as befits an ICL blog; its current contributors are Alex Fielding, Manuel Eynard, Maria Eleni Vignoli, Maria Radziejowska, Paul Bradfield, and Peter Dixon. I particularly want to single out a fantastic post by Alex Fielding on Judge Harhoff's...
[Žygimantas Juška is a member of the defense team of Radovan Karadžić] One of the most high-profile cases before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)—Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić—provides an opportunity to propose changes for the standby counsel model. Nevertheless, the ICTY has struggled to balance the effectiveness of standby counsel and its huge financial burden on the Tribunal. The ICTY previously...
[Marta Bo is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Genova, Italy and a member of the Peace and Justice Initiative. She wrote this post while she was a Visiting Fellow at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law] Over the past few years, several proposals have been made to put an end to the culture of impunity persisting among Somali...
