The Special Court for Sierra Leone sentenced Charles Taylor to 50 years today following his conviction for 11 counts of war crimes. He will get six-years' credit for the time he has served since being in custody in The Hague. The ICC Appeals Chamber has unanimously rejected the Prosecution's appeal on the Pre-Trial Chamber I's decision declining to confirm the charges...
Given my basic cynicism toward just about everything, I'm difficult to shock. But I was certainly shocked to learn that Yale University is allowing Gen. Stanley McChrystal to teach a course that enrolled students have to agree in writing not to discuss. Here is Gian Gentile, a professor at West Point, criticizing the course in The Atlantic: Enter retired...
I originally thought it was a story in The Onion, but once again truth is stranger than fiction: Top international prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, best known for pursuing war criminals, has been nominated as chief investigator at FIFA, soccer's scandal-plagued governing body, with a brief to probe match-fixing and corruption. FIFA's executive committee is due to discuss the appointment of a chief investigator...
Of all the items to capture blogospheric attention this Memorial Day weekend – one of the few times a year in the States when more than a handful of popular news outlets focus on what it means for our military and our country that we have been at war for more than a decade – MSNBC pundit Chris Hayes’ remarks...
The current ICC Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has been nominated by FIFA to head an ethics investigation into the organization's match-fixing and corruption issues. Charles Taylor will be sentenced tomorrow in The Hague. You can watch the sentencing live with links provided on the Court’s website. Also in The Hague tomorrow, the ICC will release the judgment on the Prosecution's appeal in the...
I’ll look forward to digesting today’s lengthy, front-page article along with my colleagues. In the meantime, one snippet: It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the...
On past Memorial Day weekend celebrations I have posted various speeches and photos in memory of our fallen heroes. For this Memorial Day weekend, I thought I would offer you a different perspective and present one of the best anti-war poems ever written. The poem "The Battle of Blenheim" by Robert Southey was assigned in my younger son's...
Foreign Policy in Focus reports on Europe's immigration dilemma after the Arab Spring. IMF Chief Christine Lagarde has attracted the ire of the Greeks over her comments in a Guardian interview last week that it is payback time. The UN Security Council has condemned Syria over the massacre of at least 108 people in the city of Houla. The Syrian government denies involvement and The Telegraph reports how...
I've been meaning to blog about the 33-year sentence that Pakistan recently imposed on Shakil Afridi, the doctor who secretly worked with the CIA to locate bin Laden. The United States is predictably up in arms over the sentence, with Leon Panetta recently claiming that "[i]t is so difficult to understand and it’s so disturbing that they would sentence...
This week on Opinio Juris, we continued last week’s book discussion of Laura Dickinson’s Outsourcing War and Peace: Preserving Public Values in a World of Privatized Foreign Affairs, with Laura’s post on the role of organizational structure and institutional structure as a mechanism of accountability and constraint, and her response to Steve Vladeck and to the other commentators. In a guest...
Supporters of US ratification of the Law of the Sea Treaty now have a network home, curiously called "The American Sovereignty Campaign." It seems to be a serious undertaking, counting the US Chamber of Commerce and the Pew Charitable Trusts among its members, running this polished ad in the print media. What of the use of "sovereignty" here? From the coalition's...
Ukraine and Honduras have initiated complaints at the World Trade Organization against Australia with respect to the latter's plain cigarette packaging rules. Neither country has much trade with Australia. (Ukrainian cigarettes? Doesn't sound very appealing!) So why bother? Because the cigarette companies are fronting legal costs. From Reuters: Both complainants have "requested consultations" with Australia, the first step in the WTO...
