Cross-posted at LieberCode. David Rieff has an interesting – and somewhat polemical – article in the latest Foreign Policy. Rieff, you will recall, was an early supporter of intervention, a policy position no doubt influenced by his time spent in Bosnia which culminated in Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. Although initially hawkish on intervention, and willing to support liberal...
For those of you no longer getting the New York Times in print, this was the lead story in today's paper. (Somewhat weirdly, it shows up on the webpage as a blog post.) Apple's signing on to Fair Labor Association standards and auditing is probably the biggest thing ever to happen in the world of private, rights-related codes of conduct....
If you are around Washington DC this week on Wednesday and Thursday, you might want to (advance) register and attend a major human rights conference at my school, Washington College of Law, American University, "Forensic Evidence in the Fight Against Torture." My law school's dean, Claudio Grossman, is a major figure in UN and regional human rights bodies, and is...
[The following is a guest post by Dan Joyner, Professor of Law at the University of Alabama. Our thanks to him for contributing it.] So, as you probably guessed from the title of this post, it’s going to be a bit of a rant. But this has been festering inside me for the past five years and I want to get...
My friend Dapo Akande takes me to task today at EJIL: Talk! for my position on drone strikes directed at combatants attending a funeral or helping the wounded. I will address his curious reluctance to address the text of the Rome Statute in Part II of my response; in this post, I want to address his arguments concerning IHL. Here...
That's the conclusion drawn in this blockbuster report -- which, precisely because it is a blockbuster that makes Israel and the MEK's vast number of Democratic and Republican supporters in the U.S. look bad, has been basically ignored in the "liberal" media: Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed,...
Cross-posted at LieberCode. It is becoming increasingly likely that Russia and China are going to block just about any resolution on Syria coming out of the Security Council, regardless of whether it is meaningful or not. They aren’t going to support a resolution that seriously denounces the regime, nor are they going to support an ICC...
Harold Koh’s keynote address today at the University of Virginia conference did a nice job surveying the legal landscape from the Legal Adviser’s perspective. He divided the conflicts into four categories: non-conflicts, soft conflicts, hard conflicts, and hardest conflicts. He then outlined specific examples in his daily docket that fall into each category. Details on the...
The case involves Luis Moreno-Ocampo's decision to remove Ekkehard Witkopf, then a Senior Trial Lawyer with the OTP, from Lubanga. The following paragraphs from the ILO's judgment best summarize what happened: On 15 December 2008 the Deputy Prosecutor informed the complainant orally that the Executive Committee had decided that he would no longer lead the trial of the Lubanga case on...
Matters in Syria are going from bad to worse. I am sure this won't do any harm, but it is not going to help either. It will simply give the illusion that the international community is dong something about Syria. Syrian officials suspected of committing or ordering crimes against humanity should face prosecution in the International Criminal Court (ICC), the United...
I found this interview in Der Spiegel of Fritz Vahrenholt, a German renewable energy executive and a former Social Democratic Party figure fascinating since he doesn't fit the profile of most climate change skeptics. Varenholt has a new book coming out, "Die Kalte Sonne" (The Cold Sun), rejecting the IPCC's global warming models and climate change predictions. I don't know what to make...
By now, most readers have probably seen the following photo, in which Marine snipers in Afghanistan pose in front of a flag with the runes of the SS: I wasn't planning on blogging about the photo, because the insensitivity of the snipers and the awfulness of the symbolism speak for themselves. But then I saw this ridiculous statement by a...
