I'm under the pump because of a deadline, but I wanted to call readers' attention to a short editorial at OpenDemocracy.net written by Victor Kattan about the PLO/PA's intention to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize Palestinian statehood in September. Victor discusses a variety of interesting diplomatic and legal aspects of that intention, including the possibility that the PLO/PA...
I am delighted to announce the publication of my book "The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law." The book can be ordered from Oxford University Press here; Amazon should have it (at a whopping $8.78 discount) in the next few days. Here for the last time is the cover: Once again, I want to thank...
Earlier today, the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review (CMCR) held in U.S. v. Hamdan that material support for terrorism is a war crime and thus within the jurisdiction of the military commissions. The decision represents the apotheosis of the US's utterly self-referential approach to international law, because the CMCR managed to reach that conclusion without citing a single non-American...
Apologies for the light blogging the past couple of weeks -- although the upside is that I am now officially Dr. Heller, having successfully defended my dissertation at Leiden University in the Netherlands a few days ago. It was an amazing (and amazingly formal) experience, and I'll blog about it once I get the official photos from the university. I've been...
I have just posted a new essay -- my first since finishing the NMT book! -- on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Scholars have long debated to what extent the Rome Statute’s principle of complementarity permits states to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide as ordinary crimes such as rape and murder instead...
In Serbia, not surprisingly: Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general accused of overseeing the worst massacre in Europe since the end of World War II, has been arrested, Serbian authorities said Thursday. Mladic is Europe's most wanted war crimes suspect for his alleged role in the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica,...
This according to the New York Times: The charges — brought by prosecutors Mr. Mubarak had appointed — included hints that former subordinates might testify against him, as onetime allies and government insiders turn on one another. A Cairo criminal court is expected to set a trial date within days, and the Egyptian people could soon see the leader...
The following post was written by Luna Droubi. Droubi, who is Syrian American, was Editor in Chief of the New York Law School Law Review from 2010-2011 and received her J.D. this month. As a child, I remember sitting with my grandfather on my grandparent's balcony in Homs, Syria on hot, sticky summer nights. We'd swat away at mosquitoes as...
In his post below, Harold Koh continually refers to the existence of an "armed conflict" between the U.S. and al Qaeda. Koh does not specify what kind of armed conflict the U.S. believes exists, but he references Common Article 3 in the detention section of the ASIL speech that he quotes, indicating that the U.S. believes it is in a...
Mark Kersten has a useful post today at his excellent Justice in Conflict blog about what will happen once the OTP announces the results of its investigation of the Libya situation. Check it out!...
Here I was, thinking that targeted killing raised complex and contestable legal issues that required painstaking analysis. Fortunately, Somin sets me straight at Volokh Conspiracy by pointing out that, as a simple matter of logic, there is no legal difference between killing Admiral Yamamoto during World War II and killing a terrorist anywhere in the world today: But most of the...
Because the "Untold Stories" symposium that Gerry Simpson and I organized was such a success, we are organizing another one. Here is the call for papers: THE EICHMANN TRIAL AT 50 A two-day international symposium to discuss one of the most important trials of the 20th Century Melbourne Law School 14-15 October 2011 Presented by The Asia Pacific Centre for Military Law, Melbourne Law School,...
