The media is widely reporting (see, for example, the Washington Post here) that later today Charles Taylor will become the first sitting or former Head of State to have his fate decided by an international tribunal. They should really do their research: the Nuremberg Tribunal convicted Karl Doenitz, the Commander in Chief of the German Navy, who served as the...
I am delighted to announce that over the next few days Opinio Juris will be hosting a symposium on what is increasingly called, following Tel Aviv University's Aeyal Gross, the "functional approach" to the law of occupation. Here is the description that was sent to the contributors: Occupation law has undergone significant evolution in modern times, and cases such as Iraq...
In my previous post, I discussed the Registry's report of its visit with Saif Gaddafi in Libya, which was posted on the ICC website and then removed without explanation a few hours later. It has come to my attention that the Office of Public Counsel for the Defence (OPCD) also prepared a report of that visit -- and that the...
So reports Radio Netherlands Worldwide. The dispute, not surprisingly, involves Luis Moreno-Ocampo and Libya: This week the court’s public defender, Xavier-Jean Keita, accused chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo of siding with the Libyans and demanded he be removed from the case. In a court filing boiling with indignation, he accused Ocampo of making misleading statements during a visit to Tripoli this week...
I have uploaded a copy of the report, which was available for a couple of hours on the ICC website but then removed without explanation. (It's marked public.) Representatives of the Registry spent five days in Libya in late February and early March, so things could have changed significantly since that time. Nevertheless, the report paints an interesting -- and...
[Michael A. Newton is Professor of the Practice of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School] The Kony 2012 campaign had the laudable goal of increasing public awareness in order to aid the search for justice and accountability in the wake of LRA atrocities. In fact, the worldwide attention had the paradoxical effect of demonstrating the lamentable reality that the optimal pathway towards...
[Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor at Washington and Lee University and author of Reimagining Child Soldiers (OUP, 2012).] How does Kony2012 inform our understanding of child soldiers? How does it sculpt international efforts to prevent child soldiering? Kony2012 feeds into and reinforces pre-existing assumptions and narratives. I argue in my book Reimagining Child Soldiers that these assumptions...
[Julie McBride is a PhD Candidate at Queen’s University Belfast, researching the development of the war crime of child soldier recruitment in international criminal law, and a member of the United Nations Global Experts, specializing in international crime and transitional justice. You can find her on Twitter @JA_McBride] When the Kony2012 video was launched last month, I found myself, for one of the first times,...
[Beth Karlin is the Program Director of the Transformational Media Lab within the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs (CUSA) as well as a Research Associate at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and a doctoral student in the School of Social Ecology at University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the potential and application of new media and technologies for civic...
[Mark Kersten is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of the blog Justice in Conflict. You can find him on Twitter @MarkKersten] It is widely accepted wisdom that social media is radically transforming how we understand the world and share information. In this context, the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, blogging, etc. challenge the very practice...
[Sarah Kendzior is an instructor at Washington University in Saint Louis. Follow her on Twitter @sarahkendzior] Kony2012 rose and fell on the power of celebrity. “We want to make Kony famous”, Invisible Children proclaimed, and it did, enlisting the support of twenty “culture-makers” to spread the word that an African child-killer was still at large. Kony2012 is often touted as an example of...
[Jay Milbrandt is the Director of the Global Justice Program at Pepperdine University School of Law. Jay is the author of the recent book Go and Do: Daring to Change the World One Story at a Time. You can connect with Jay on his blog or on Twitter @JayMilbrandt] I was the target market for Kony 2012. I’m a connected, engaged Millennial. ...
