You can find all 574 pages of it here. From the press release: The UN Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone on Tuesday released its long-awaited report on the Gaza conflict, in which it concluded there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed...
Although often critical of Israel, I have always been sympathetic to Israeli claims that the UN Human Rights Council has deliberately appointed individuals to investigate conditions in the Palestinian territories who were either actually biased against Israel or who at least could not avoid the appearance of bias. I was completely opposed, for example, to the HRC's decision to appoint...
1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) It is a curious feature of international human rights that we are reluctant to speak about foundations. As Jacques Maritain put it with respect...
My friend Jens Ohlin, who teaches at Cornell, has posted an important new essay on SSRN, "The Torture Lawyers." Here is the abstract of the essay, which is forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal: One of the longest shadows cast by the Bush Administration’s War on Terror involves the fate of the torture lawyers who authored or signed memoranda approving...
(Update: See KJH's post above, particularly pointing out that the prosecutor has not formally opened an investigation, but is only "collecting information." Likewise Kevin's point that a couple of the laws of war possible violations I mention are not actually crimes under the ICC statute. Thanks, Kevin.) The Wall Street Journal reports today that the prosecutor's office of the International Criminal...
Adam has kindly allowed me to post his response -- which first appeared at Making Sense of Darfur -- to my criticism of his claim that domestic trials or a TRC would likely have been better than the IMT. Here it is, in full: Neither truth commissions nor domestic trials are as black and white as Professor Heller’s critique of my...
The Ninth Circuit last week argued that it did not have personal jurisdiction over DaimlerChrysler Corporation AG because it did not have continuous and systematic contacts with the forum. The case of Bauman v. DaimlerChrysler AG arose out of the alleged kidnapping, detention and torture of Argentinian citizens in Argentina by Argentinian state security forces acting at the direction...
Rachel Irwin of IWPR has published a typically excellent article on the role of victims in Lubanga. (The article quotes me liberally, though, so you shouldn't take my word for that.) A taste: A total of 99 victims represented by seven lawyers are participating in the Lubanga trial at the International Criminal Court, ICC. The lawyers are present in the courtroom...
The blog Making Sense of Darfur has been hosting a symposium on Adam M. Smith's book After Genocide: Bringing the Devil to Justice, in which the author argues -- oversimplifying only slightly -- that international criminal trials are always inferior to domestic trials and non-punitive accountability mechanisms. I have neither the time nor the inclination to address the book's claims...
My favorite part of the Wall Street Journal's article on ATS litigation, discussed by Ken below, has to be this comment by the lawyer who defends such lawsuits: In assessing liability, a key question can be whether companies assisted a foreign government that was known to violate human rights, says Joe Cyr, a New York lawyer who defends companies against alien...
The WSJ has a news story (Nathan Koppel, "Arcane Law Brings Conflicts From Overseas to U.S. Courts," Thursday, August 27, 2009) on the rise of ATS suits against corporate defendants. It quotes Curt Bradley, but interestingly (I thought, for an area traditionally dominated by academics), it has more quotes from practicing lawyers, including John Bellinger, Center for Constitutional Rights's Katherine Gallagher,...
My friend and former colleague at Auckland, Mohsen Al Attar, has posted two new articles about TWAIL on SSRN. The first, co-written with Rosalie Moore, is entitled "TWAIL Revisited - The Bolivarian Reconstruction of International Law." The second, co-written with Vernon Ivan Tava, is entitled "TWAIL Pedagogy - Legal Education for Emancipation." The abstracts are after the jump. I highly recommend...
