In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Human Rights Law

25 Feb

I've heard that the docket for the European Court of Human Rights is out of control, but a backlog of 120,000* cases is a little ridiculous. There is no doubt about the seriousness of the situation in Strasbourg. Jean-Paul Costa, president of the European Court of Human Rights, has referred to it as extremely disturbing. The parliamentary assembly of the Council of...

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23 Feb

The following is a guest-post -- actually a short book-proposal -- by my friend Mark Osiel, the Aliber Family Chair in Law at the University of Iowa.  I have agreed to post it despite the inordinate jealousy I feel toward his remarkable productivity.  Mark would greatly appreciate comments and criticisms, especially examples and counter-examples of what he is trying to...

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22 Feb

I am sitting in the Indianapolis airport as I write this, heading home from a conference on the Milosevic trial.  The conference was easily the most enjoyable I've ever attended -- I vastly prefer small, specialized conferences to mega-events like the AALS or ASIL.  The attendees were a superb mix of academics, former OTP investigators and analysts, and defence attorneys. ...

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20 Feb

I don't have much time, but it's important to note that although David Margolis may be a career attorney, he has made a career out of preventing government officials from being held accountable for their misconduct.  From Scott Horton: But “Yoda” Margolis also knows the “dark side” of political intrigue. He was long the man to whom political appointees could...

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03 Feb

I intend to closely follow the reactions to the Appeals Chamber's decision on the genocide charges against Bashir.  The pushback has already begun in a predictable place: the Making Sense of Darfur blog, which has led the charge against the arrest warrant. The post itself, in which David Barsoum asks "what is the ICC really after in Sudan?", is not...

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29 Jan

As we get closer to the review conference on the ICC, many of us have been watching, and perhaps commenting on, ways in which the US might or might not take part as an observer.  It seems certain that the US will be an observer at the review conference, and the primary issue on the table for the conference is the crime of aggression.  My own view of this is that the whole effort is a mistake - essentially for the reasons that Michael Glennon lays out in his fine new Yale International Law Journal article, The Blank Prose Crime of Aggression.  However, as I remark at the end of this post, whatever one's prescriptive views, descriptively the effort appears to raise questions about "contracting around" the Security Council in a changing world but un-amendable UN.
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21 Jan

The proposed anti-homosexuality legislation introduced by Ugandan parliament back-bencher David Bahati is creating an international outcry. The bill--introduced as a private member's bill without government support--would impose the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality," defined as "sex with a minor or a disabled person, where the offender is HIV-positive, a parent or a person in authority over the victim, or...

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24 Dec

The Trial Chamber has -- completely unsurprisingly -- rejected Dr. Karadzic's motion challenging Richard Harvey's appointment as stand-by counsel.  As I explained in a previous post, that challenge was based on three grounds: (1) Harvey's appointment violates Article 21(4) of the ICTY Statute, which provides that a defendant has the right “to communicate with counsel of his own choosing” and...

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13 Dec

One of my favorite issues of the New York Times Magazine is its "year in ideas" issue, which comes annually in December.  Because OJ is a repository of things related to battlefield robotics and law and ethics, I wanted to flag for your attention the item by Dara Kerr, "Guilty Robots." [I]magine robots that obey injunctions like Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative...

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