In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Human Rights Law

04 Mar

Last fall, the U.S. joined Egypt in a carefully worded statement in favor of free expression, but it raised concerns that the U.S. was implicitly endorsing the movement in many Islamic countries to ban blasphemous (or anti-Islamic) speech.   In an otherwise anodyne address to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs...

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03 Mar

I am delighted to announce that Luis Moreno-Ocampo has appointed my friend and colleague Tim McCormack to be the Office of the Prosecutor's Special Adviser on International Humanitarian Law.  From the announcement: Professor McCormack, from the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne will help the Office of the Prosecutor to develop a solid understanding of complex legal issues such...

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28 Feb

My new Weekly Standard essay - although “polemic” is probably closer to it.  And thanks, Julian, for the plug below! Well, regular readers have been hearing about this piece for a while, and I have posted various arguments from it (concerning targeted killing and Predator drones and the CIA and armed conflict and self-defense, and my general concern that the...

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27 Feb

Both Humblelawstudent and Stuart Taylor have criticized my previous post.  Both misunderstand the federal torture statute and the concept of torture in important -- and unfortunately all too common -- ways, so it is worth explaining their errors in a separate post. Let's begin with HLS.  He claims that, contrary to my assertion, "the statute requires the interrogator to actually...

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27 Feb

David Luban and Stuart Taylor are having an interesting exchange at Balkinization over whether the CIA's use of waterboarding qualifies as torture under the federal torture statute, 18 USC 2340.  Luban accuses Taylor of embracing "the fundamental trick used by the torture lawyers: pretending that the legal definition of 'torture' is something technical rather than 'colloquial'," when...

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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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