In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Topics

21 Dec

[Marko Milanovic is lecturer in law at the University of Nottingham School of Law.] It is a pleasure to participate in this discussion organized by the Leiden Journal of International Law and Opinio Juris, and to comment on Professor Besson’s interesting article, which I enjoyed reading. Not to beat around the bush, I (very amicably!) disagree with much of Professor Besson’s article, just as much as she disagrees with much of what I wrote in my recent book on the topic (discussed here on Opinio Juris and at EJIL: Talk!). So there. Let me try to explain why. Professor Besson’s main claim is that prior scholarship on the ECHR’s extraterritorial application, most of it very critical of the European Court’s case law, has not given serious thought to normative considerations that underpin the issue, ‘except for vague and often misleading gestures to the  universality of human rights that allegedly requires their extraterritorial application.’ Generally speaking, in Besson’s view that scholarship is under-theorized and the vague references to universality fail to account for the relational nature of rights and obligations under human rights treaties. To remedy that, the ‘article endeavours to bring some normative human rights theorizing to bear on the ECtHR’s recent practice on extraterritoriality [and] hopes thereby to provide a different reading of the Court’s case law and show that it has been wrongly depicted by some authors as fragmented and even contradictory.’ 
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21 Dec

[Cedric Ryngaert is an Associate Professor at KU Leuven and the University of Utrecht] Samantha Besson has provided a fine normative account of the extraterritorial application of the ECHR. At the same time, she believes that this account may well offer a rationalization of the string of controversial ECtHR decisions in this matter. Besson’s argument may or may not have explanatory power as regards the ECtHR case-law, but what is sure is that the Court will be happy to hear that, as far as extraterritoriality is concerned, it can at least count on some academic supporters. I concur with Besson’s analysis in many respects, but in the interest of the discussion I would like to elaborate on some points of disagreement. In my view, that which Besson has added to existing analyses of extraterritoriality is the normative dimension of the concept of jurisdiction, as the third constitutive element of jurisdiction, apart from effective power and overall control. Drawing on legal theorist Joseph Raz’s writings, Besson submits that jurisdiction, qua de facto authority, ‘amounts to more than the mere exercise of coercion or power, as a result: it also includes a normative dimension by reference to the imposition of reasons for action on its subjects and the corresponding appeal for compliance (e.g., through giving instructions)’. Further on in her article, drawing on theorists of democracy, she cites the ‘all-subjected principle’, which ‘requires actual normative subjectedness and not only affectedness’.
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21 Dec

The ICTR issued its final decision yesterday, sentencing former Rwandan minister Augustin Ngirabatware to 35 years in prison. An Argentine court sentenced former Interior Minister Jaime Smart to life in prison for crimes against humanity during the nation's 1976-1983 “Dirty War.” The UN sees no prospect of an end to the violence in Syria, according to Ban Ki-Moon, and urges unity from...

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20 Dec

[Mónika Ambrus is an assistant Professor at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam] The interpretation of the expression ‘members of the group’ in the different actus rea under Article 2 of the Genocide Convention through which genocide can be committed as well as that of ‘racial, ethnic or national origin or religious affiliation’ in the chapeau of the same article essentially boils down to who can be seen as victim of genocide (how the protected groups and their members can be identified). As simple an exercise this might seem to be, both case law and scholarly discussion, including this online symposium of the Leiden Journal of International Law, have shown that this is, indeed, not the case. Two main reasons could be identified underlying the different positions: (1) the one relates to the dimension one focuses on in the definition of genocide and the conceptualization of the relationship between the two dimensions, and (2) the other concerns the question of interpretation and the role of the judiciary.
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20 Dec

[Frederic Mégret is an Associate Professor of Law and the Canada Research Chair on the Law of Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, at  McGill University] Monika Ambrus offers a compelling treatment of the question of what constitutes genocide and persecution as a crime against humanity relying on the human rights law of discrimination to reinforce the case that both protected groups and the definition of who belongs to them should be seen as subjective questions, focusing on the state of mind of the perpetrator, rather than objective as objective issues. In that, she suggests that it is time to move beyond international criminal courts’ constant indecision between an objective and a subjective approach, and to more resolutely move towards the latter. I could not agree more. I note also that in using international human rights law to make a larger point about international criminal law (and, one might hope, vice versa) she does a praiseworthy job of breaking barriers between sister disciplines that have no reason of standing wholly apart. In this short reaction, I will start not from the case law as Ambrus does, but from some of the underlying ambiguities of the concepts of groups, and how these were bound to create problems for the Law that end up telling us something about the enterprise of international criminal justice.  In that respect, I want to help contextualize Ambrus’s arguments in some of the challenges of post-modernizing an international legal project whose structures often remain embedded in 19th Century thinking.
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20 Dec

[William Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University in London] This article is about the fine points of how we construe a legal text adopted through a complex process of negotiation more than sixty years ago. The post-Second World War codification of genocide is notoriously narrow in scope. The reasons are relatively easy to explain. At Nuremberg, the four ‘great powers’ had been nervous about their potential liability for crimes against humanity because of the persecution of minorities for which they were themselves responsible within their colonies or inside their own borders. For purely selfish reasons, they insisted that crimes against humanity be linked to aggressive war, failing which they would not be deemed offences at international law. In that way, Nazi atrocities against Jews within Germany could be punished as crimes under international law, while segregation and lynching in the southern United States (and similar acts attributable to Britain, France and the Soviet Union) escaped the net of international criminal liability. When these same powers concurred in the adoption of the Genocide Convention by the United Nations General Assembly two years later, they agreed to remove the perverse nexus with armed conflict for a category of atrocity crime that they understood to be much more limited in extent than crimes against humanity. This is the definition of genocide that scholars, lawyers and judges have struggled to deconstruct over the ensuing decades. The text adopted in 1948 provides explicitly that ‘genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law’ (my emphasis).  These words were necessary in order to clarify a fundamental distinction between genocide and crimes against humanity, as the concepts were conceived of at the time. 
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20 Dec

[Dov Jacobs is the Senior Editor for Expert Blogging at the Leiden Journal of International Law and Assistant Professor of International Law at Leiden University] Over the next couple of days, you will discover the fourth symposium published this year by the Leiden Journal of International Law in collaboration with Opinio Juris. The symposia up to now featured dynamic discussions on the...

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20 Dec

Al Qaeda has staged a comeback in Syria, posing a dilemma for the opposition fighting to remove President Bashar al-Assad and making the West balk at military backing for the revolt. The United Nations Security Council members, except for the United States, have condemned Israel’s latest plans to construct thousands of settlement homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The UN Security...

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19 Dec

Today marked the limited release in the United States of the already much heralded new film on the United States' hunt for Osama bin Laden. I have not yet seen the film and won't comment on it until I do. But I do want to at least pass along this remarkable open letter issued today by 1 Republican and 2...

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19 Dec

John Bellinger's op-ed in today's New York Times, "Obama's Weakness on Treaties,"  is clear on an important tactical issue on treaty passage but somewhat muted on a more improtant, strategic, issue.   His main argument is that, given rising Republican intransigence against treaties--any treaties--, President Obama should be trying harder to pass treaties like the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons...

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19 Dec

Yesterday, in its second decision to date, the International Criminal Court acquitted Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui of the seven counts of war crimes and three counts of crimes against humanity he faced related to the conflict about ten years ago in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, due to lack of evidence. In the face of criticism from many on the acquittal...

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18 Dec

On December 17 the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 2083, which further details the listing / delisting criteria for the 1287 Al Qaida Sanctions regime.   This Resolution also extends the Ombudsperson’s mandate for another 30 months, guaranteeing some stability for those who seek delisting.  Simultaneously, the Council adopted Resolution 2082, applying the same measures to the Taliban sanctions regime. Last...

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