In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Human Rights Law

05 Sep

Kristen’s last post concludes by opening the giant can of worms at the heart of international human rights law: “Farer’s analogy [between recent U.S. counterterrorism measures and Latin American practices in the 1980’s] shows weaknesses in the [human rights] compliance system generally…. [B]ecause it remains an issue of domestic competence as to whether human rights are enforced in the face...

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31 Aug

There’s so much domestic news these days it would’ve been easy to miss Eric Lichtblau’s story in yesterday’s New York Times about legislation introduced in Congress just before the August recess that would substantially define the scope of the United States’ war with Al Qaeda, et al. Indeed, it’s not clear why the Times itself finally just realized the significance...

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30 Aug

My blogging has slowed down the past couple of weeks, because I've been traveling and finishing a book chapter that criticizes Moreno-Ocampo's approach to deciding which situations to investigate.  (See my previous post.)  But I would be remiss if I did not mention this interesting piece of news -- the Fifth Circuit has reversed the district court's dismissal of the...

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30 Aug

The Guardian seems to think so: A coalition of human rights lawyers, academics and leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has begun openly to criticise the competence and conduct of the prosecutor of the international criminal court, the Argentinian Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Their concerns follow his announcement last month that it is to seek an arrest warrant for genocide against the Sudanese president, and...

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29 Aug

The blog Futurismic as an interesting post on "viral sovereignty." According to a recent Washington Post op-ed by Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett:  This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations — even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat...

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24 Aug

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my experiences in Georgia in the early 1990s, monitoring the various conflicts - Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the then-Georgian civil war in Tbilisi.  I noted that those secessionist conflicts were marked on each side by ethnic cleansing as extreme as anything I saw in the Yugloslav wars (a country which I also...

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21 Aug

I know politics makes strange bedfellows, but this is ridiculous: Two unlikely allies met for breakfast last month in New York to discuss a possible collaboration: Mia Farrow, actress and passionate activist for Darfur refugees, and Erik Prince, founder and CEO of the government contractor, Blackwater Worldwide. Farrow told ABC News that Blackwater, despite its controversial history and allegations of murdering civilians...

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20 Aug

The Olympics have been amazing. Great athletes, amazing venues, wonderful organization. The Chinese have much to be proud of. But whatever goodwill that the Olympics have engendered in me is quickly being lost based on their treatment of dissent. The Chinese are being utterly hypocritical in promising to afford opportunities for dissent but not making good...

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18 Aug

I've missed Eric Muller's blogging at Is That Legal? -- but he has obviously put his free time to good use, because his new article on the Supreme Court's decision in Hirabayashi v. United States is sensational.  Here is the abstract: This Article presents newly discovered archival evidence demonstrating that government lawyers told a crucial lie to the United States Supreme...

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15 Aug

Last October, Col. Morris Davis resigned as chief prosecutor of the military commissions, claiming that Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann had interfered with the prosecutor's office, pressured him to use classified evidence -- requiring sessions to be conducted behind closed doors -- and encouraged the use of evidence obtained through waterboarding.  Col. Davis filed a formal complaint at the time, but...

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14 Aug

Our friend John Boonstra at UN Dispatch calls attention to a little-used provision of the UN Charter that requires members of the Security Council to abstain from voting on substantive matters when they are a party to a dispute.  Here is the text of Article 27(3): Decisions of the Security Council on all other matters shall be made by an affirmative...

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