There has been a very interesting -- and potentially very troubling -- development in the Lubanga trial. In response to a submission by representatives for the victims and over a strong dissent by Judge Fulford, the majority of Trial Chamber I has given notice to the parties and participants in the trial "that the legal characterisation of the facts may...
Last month the Eleventh Circuit in Valencia-Trujillo v. United States rendered an unusual decision that required the court to decide whether a state was acting "pursuant" to a treaty. If it was, the defendant had standing to pursue the action. If it was not, then he had no such standing. In extradition jurisprudence, the so-called “specialty rule” provides that...
Marc Ambinder over at the Atlantic has posted his interview with Professor Glenn Sulmasy, whose new book The National Security Court System: A Natural Evolution of Justice in an Age of Terror has just been published by OUP. Ambinder summarizes the central arguments and proposals of Sulmasy's book: Sulmasy expands on what he calls a "hybrid" approach to the quandary of...
Until his arrest by the Rwandan military earlier this year, General Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi and former chairman of the Congolese Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), had been considered one of the key destabilizing figures in eastern Congo. Back in 2004, Nkunda and his rebel troops took control of the South Kivu town of Bukavu,...
As part of his latest attack on Human Rights Watch, David Bernstein insists -- again -- that HRW "absolutely refuses to apologize or retract" when it is "wrong about Israel." He also claims that, "[t]hough challenged," I have "yet to come up with another, legitimate example of HRW officially responded to legitimate criticisms from pro-Israel sources the way it responded...
Excellent news -- and a major blow to the AU's promise of impunity for Bashir, given the symbolic and practical importance of South Africa for the continent generally: SOUTH Africa will arrest Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir if he visits the country, despite an African Union decision to ignore a war crimes warrant against him, the foreign ministry said yesterday. Civil society...
David Bernstein is back with yet another attack on Human Rights Watch. This time, Bernstein is up in arms that, in 2006, HRW retracted a claim that armed Palestinian groups had committed war crimes by using human shields -- an action that he believes proves, in light of HRW's refusal to apologize for its allegedly false criticisms of Israel, that...
The Rwandan government announced today that it will stop taking new gacaca cases as of July 31st and that it intends to wind down gacaca operations within five months. Gacaca is a traditional local justice procedure (gacaca roughly means “justice on the grass” in Kinyarwanda) that the government modified to process the staggering number of low-level genocide cases and...
For critics of universal jurisdiction, Spain's UJ statute has become the poster child for accusations of excess. How strange it seems that roughly ten years ago it was so widely celebrated as the provision that brought down General Augusto Pinochet. Spain's indicting the former Chilean dictator and Britain's detaining him on the attendant arrest warrant and extradition request...
A couple of weeks ago, Sweden did something unprecedented for an EU nation -- it indicated it would proceed with the extradition of an accused Rwandan génocidaire to Kigali. Sylvere Ahorugeze, a 53-year-old former director of Rwanda's civil aviation authority, is implicated in the 1994 murder of a group of civilians in the Kigali suburb of Gikondo. He...
My thanks to Deb for her post on the Preliminary Report. I won't rehash what she said; I just wanted to offer a few thoughts on the military commissions and the detention policy. First, I think it is interesting that the Obama administration seems to be conceding that "material support for terrorism" is not a violation of the laws of...
British Justice Secretary Jack Straw recently proposed amending the United Kingdom's International Criminal Court Act of 2001 (which permits universal jurisdiction prosecution of atrocity crimes) to allow authorities to file cases for atrocities committed as far back as January 1, 1991. This would close a loophole that has been giving safe haven to génocidaires who enter the UK after...
