I want to call readers' attention to Douglas Guilfoyle's article "The Mavi Marmara Incident and Blockade in Armed Conflict," which is forthcoming in the British Year Book of International Law. (Subscription required.) It's absolutely superb -- comprehensive, analytic, and above all fair. Indeed, its conclusions differ in important ways from those of the UN HRC report, the Turkel Commission inquiry...
David Hicks is back in the news here in Australia, because the DPP has announced that it intends to seize any royalties he receives from the sale of his book, Guantanamo: My Journey. The DPP's decision has received a great deal of criticism, for a variety of reasons: Hicks accepted a plea because the US government threatened to put him...
Three stories to mention. First, Moreno-Ocampo plans to introduce WikiLeaks cables in the trial of the six Kenyan defendants: This emerged as he prepares to hand over the last batch of the evidence he will rely on in the September hearing against three of Kenya’s six post-election violence suspects. The evidence to be released on Wednesday relates to the...
Or so it would seem, based on this analysis from the European Center for Law and Justice, a right-leaning public interest law firm. A proposed new law in Poland appears to ban abortion under any circumstance, thus replacing the current law, which allows exemptions for the mother's health and for cases of rape and incest. If, as the ECLJ argues,...
As part of his ongoing war against the New York Times, Ben Wittes has a post today entitled "Seven Errors in Today's New York Times Editorial." I occasionally agree with Wittes' criticism of the NYT; the paper sometimes misstates the law when it criticizes the Obama administration. But there is nothing erroneous about today's editorial, and Wittes can only claim...
I have just posted a new essay on SSRN, entitled "The Uncertain Legal Status of the Aggression Understandings." The essay will be published by the Journal of International Criminal Justice as part of a symposium on the ICC's new crime of aggression. Here is the abstract: Annex III of Resolution RC/Res.6, adopted by consensus at Kampala on 12 June 2010, contains...
The following is a guest-post by Mark Kersten. Mark is a PhD candidate in International Relations at the London School of Economics and author of the (excellent) blog Justice in Conflict. His research examines the nexus of conflict resolution and the pursuit of international criminal justice. Trying to Get to the Bottom of the “Peace versus Justice” Debate...
Thanks to Roger Alford and Opinio Juris for hosting this discussion. And renewed thanks to the distinguished respondents for their insightful commentary. Foreign official immunity issues arise in a variety of cases, especially in response to plaintiffs making commercial or human rights claims. As Larry Helfer and David Stewart emphasize (and as I discuss in the article), in the human rights...
Professor Ingrid Wuerth’s article on foreign official immunity is thorough, thoughtful and provocative, and it’s a privilege to make my first OJ appearance commenting on it. There is much to agree with in her analysis, and at the same time some questions to raise. Just over a year has now passed since the Supreme Court decided, in Samantar v. Yousuf, that...
Thanks to Opinio Juris for inviting me to comment on Foreign Official Immunity Determinations in U.S. Courts: The Case Against the State Department, Professor Ingrid Wuerth’s timely and insightful article. The springboard for the article is Samantar v. Yousuf, the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) does not apply to individual government...
We now know that there is broad agreement that if Texas Governor Perry goes forward with today's scheduled execution of Humberto Leal, he will be doing so in violation of law. Who has said so? Well, the U.S. government, the U.S. Supreme Court, at least three concurring judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, a significant number of members...
Cross posted at Balkinization Big news in the past day is the Obama administration’s announcement that a Somali national captured by the U.S. military somewhere in the Gulf has been transferred to New York for federal prosecution on terrorism-related charges. According to the Justice Department (DOJ), the man, Warsame, was “questioned for intelligence purposes for more than two months” after his...
