In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Human Rights Law

18 Mar

[Cecile Aptel is Associate Professor of International Law at the Fletcher School, Tufts University] Among the many legal and factual issues raised by the landmark Lubanga judgment rendered by the ICC this week, a central one concerns the definition of “the use [of children under 15] to participate actively in hostilities” qualified as war crimes under both article 8(2)(b)(xxvi) and 8(2)(e)(vii)...

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17 Mar

In his recent guest post, Doug Cassel attempts to portray Chevron as the innocent victim of illegal and unethical conduct by the lawyers for the plaintiffs harmed by its predecessor's dumping of 16.8 million gallons of crude oil and 20 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian rainforest.  Cassel writes as an advocate for Chevron, so he can hardly...

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17 Mar

[Doug Cassel is Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School] In an environmental suit brought by lawyers for some residents of the Amazon, an Ecuadorian court last year issued an $18.2 billion judgment against Chevron. Readers who follow the case only casually may have the impression that this is a classic case of David vs. Goliath, and that Ecuadorian courts...

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16 Mar

I'll have much to say about various legal aspects of the Lubanga judgment in the days to come, but I wanted to start by discussing the relatively narrow -- though critically important -- point that Jens addressed in his post: the dispute between the majority and Judge Fulford concerning the correct interpretation of co-perpetration in Article 25(3)(a) of the Rome...

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14 Mar

From AllAfrica.com: Today, International Criminal Court (ICC) judges in The Hague delivered the Court's first verdict—a finding of guilt against former Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga. Prosecutors accused Lubanga of the war crimes of conscripting, enlisting, and using children under the age of 15 years for combat purposes while he served as political head of the Union of Congolese...

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12 Mar

Americans are furious.  Officials are out of touch with the rest of us.  If we thought about it, we should be angry that officials do not take international law more seriously.  That is just another way that the people we send to Washington do not understand what we really need. American workers whose retirement funds hold GM stock should want to...

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11 Mar

[John Knox is Professor of Law at Wake Forest Law School] The Supreme Court’s decision to send Kiobel back for reargument on whether the Alien Tort Statute allows courts to recognize a cause of action for violations of the law of nations in foreign territory will focus attention on the presumption against extraterritoriality, as Anthony Colangelo pointed out in his recent...

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08 Mar

Scott Peterson has a fantastic timeline at the Christian Science Monitor that catalogs all the times Western countries have predicted Iran's imminent entry into the nuclear club.  Some highlights: 1984: Soon after West German engineers visit the unfinished Bushehr nuclear reactor, Jane's Defence Weekly quotes West German intelligence sources saying that Iran's production of a bomb "is entering its...

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