Marcos Zunino kicked off the week with a post on the challenges of transitional justice faced by the democratic government of Argentina with respect to the retention, removal, and vetting of judges after the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1983. In particular, Marcos analyzed the relative success of the measures taken by government in this regard in light of...
Earlier this month, I attended the opening ceremony of an exhibit on “Women and War” at a museum in the Philippines. A survivor of war time atrocities, Lola Estelita, spoke about her experiences, moving many in the audience to tears. Many other survivors of wartime sexual slavery and atrocities – called the “Lolas” or grandmothers – are now no longer...
I tweeted a link to the presentation, but I thought I might post it here along with the accompanying slides. Here is the abstract: This presentation will argue that the ICC’s newly-adopted crime of aggression is useless, anachronistic, and yet beautiful. The crime is useless because the jurisdictional regime adopted by the Assembly of States Parties ensures that the Court will...
[Marcos Zunino is a Research Fellow at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law of the British Institute of International and Comparative Law and the author of Justice Framed: A Genealogy of Transitional Justice (CUP 2019). Twitter: @MarcosZunino.] Argentina is a well-known case of transitional justice. From the pioneering 1984 truth commission and the prosecutions that had to be rolled back due...
Carlos Arturo Villagrán Sandoval kicked off the week with an illuminating discussion of the Comisión Internacional contra la Impunidad en Guatemalaor or CICIG affair and the consequences thereof on the new monist approach to international law in the Guatemalan domestic legal system. In response to a new report on State Responsibility for Modern Slavery at the UN, Kristen discussed the duty...
Though most of the outrage was manufactured and hypocritical, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) deserved criticism for her ill-expressed tweet about AIPAC. But she has more than redeemed herself with this exchange with Elliott Abrams, Trump's Special Envoy to Venezuela, at a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting yesterday. It is a delight to watch Elliott Abrams' face as he is asked --...
As I was doing some research into the invasion of Cambodia by South Vietnamese and US forces in 1970, I came across two official government accounts of the invasion -- one by the US, the other by Australia, one of the six countries that sent ground troops to Vietnam. They tell a rather different story...
Amidst all the faux outrage over a Muslim Congresswoman's (admittedly problematic) tweet -- much of it coming from evangelicals who think all Jews will burn in Hell after the rapture and right-wingers who say nothing about blatantly anti-Semitic attacks on George Soros or Israel's support for the deeply anti-Semitic Prime Minister of Hungary -- here is your daily reminder of the...
[Ralph Janik teaches international law at the University of Vienna, Faculty of Law and Webster Private University Vienna. He specializes in the interplay of international law and international relations. Twitter: @RalphJanik] The crisis in Venezuela could enter a new phase. Juan Guaidó recently flirted with the idea of a US intervention on his behalf when he refrained from ruling out to...
I was delighted to comment on an important new report by Rosana Garciandia and Philippa Webb on State Responsibility for Modern Slavery at the UN on January 31. Contemporary forms of slavery continue to be a major challenge in the 21st century. International law prohibits slavery, human trafficking and forced labour, and states are generally committed to eliminating these human rights abuses....
[Carlos Arturo Villagrán Sandoval is a PhD Candidate at Melbourne Law School. His doctoral thesis considers Comparative Regional Integration with particular emphasis on Central-America. He is currently representing civil society actors in a constitutional injunction against the Presidential decision to denounce the CICIG treaty.] The CICIG is a pioneering international body, created between Guatemala and the UN, with broad reaching effects...