Interesting discussion of innovative ways to deal with Haiti's long-term problems. Haiti is very close to a failed state. So it's time to think big. Here are four out of the box choices: 1) A New Haitian Constitution; 2) UN Trusteeship; 3) U.S. Protectorate; 4) U.S. annexation and status as a territory. Read the whole article. I actually think that...
NGO Monitor loves to criticize progressive NGOs for a lack of transparency concerning their funding. A recent report, for example, predictably attacks Human Rights Watch for not identifying all of its donors, particularly those at last year's fundraising event in Saudi Arabia: HRW publishes the names and amounts provided by some of its donors, but others remain hidden. Although HRW...
AP reports that a Dutch court of appeals has affirmed a lower court ruling that held the UN could not be sued for its failure to protect Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica: Appeals judges have ruled that relatives of victims of Europe's worst massacre since World War II cannot sue the United Nations for compensation in a Dutch court. Lawyers for...
Sudan is preparing for a national election next month. It may not be the solution for Sudan, given that it is still very doubtful that there is enough cohesiveness for a genuine democratic result. Still, I wonder if the ICC's Prosecutor may be going a little far here. A day after Sudan president Omar al-Bashir threatened to cut the fingers off...
David Bernstein links today to an article in The Times -- a right-wing British newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch -- attacking Human Rights Watch. The article is breathlessly entitled "Nazi Scandal Engulfs Human Rights Watch," which I have to admit piqued my curiousity -- until I realized that the "Nazi scandal" concerned Marc Gelasco, a research analyst who resigned from...
I've long thought that any scholar who wants to maintain his or her credibility should stay far away from the US government, no matter which party is in power. Harold Koh is a case in point. Others have highlighted his problematic testimony about targeted killing, which continued to maintain the Bush administration's fictions --...
Every time that I teach international criminal law, at least one student writes on whether you could prosecute the Burmese junta for crimes against humanity. As a matter of substantive ICL, the answer is clearly yes. The problem is jurisdictional -- who is going to prosecute them? Apparently, the UK thinks it should be the ICC via a Security Council...
Bangladesh has ratified the Rome Statute, making it the 111th member of the International Criminal Court. Bangladesh was the first country in South Asia to sign the Statute, which it did on July 17, 1998. I don't know what explains the 12-year gap between signature and ratification; if any readers know, please chime in below. Bangladesh's ratification will have immediate dividends. ...
Our friends at the University of Amsterdam's Center for International Law have asked us to announce the European Science Foundation's upcoming conference, The Responsibility to Protect: From Principle to Practice. Here is the description of the conference, which sounds like it's well worth attending: Five years after its acceptance by the 2005 World Summit, it is time to consider the...
Here is another persuasive account of why the U.S. is disadvantaged by not joining the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The case is fairly simple: There is a lot of oil and natural gas up there, and the U.S. can't negotiate with other countries to divvy it up until it signs on to UNCLOS. The 5.5 million-square-mile area...
Yesterday, the Japanese Government (now led by the Democratic Party after nearly five-plus decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party) confirmed that in the 1960s Japan and the United States entered into a series of secret defense pacts. Specifically, a committee of scholars has identified various tacit agreements allowing U.S. warships to carry nuclear weapons into Japanese ports, granting unrestricted use of...
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...
