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12 Aug

John Bellinger reflects on the meaning of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 in today's world, in a post at Foreign Policy: Today, 12 August, is the 61st anniversary of the signing of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, the international treaties designed to protect soldiers and civilians during armed conflicts.  The treaties became the focus of international attention in 2002 when the...

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12 Aug

Via FuturePundit, who observes that this is really much more broadly about lie detection, note this press release from Northwestern University: For the first time, the Northwestern researchers used the P300 testing in a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects are planning, rather than perpetrating, a crime. The P300 brain waves were measured by electrodes attached to the scalp of...

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12 Aug

Two commenters on my previous post on Kagame's increasing authoritarianism questioned whether Rwanda arrested Peter Erlinder because of his representation of defendants at the ICTR.  Fortuitously, Kate Gibson -- my colleague on the Karadzic case and a defense attorney at the ICTR -- has just published an ASIL Insight on the arrest that supports my claim.  Here is a taste...

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11 Aug

[caption id="attachment_13091" align="alignright" width="144" caption="State Seal of South Korea"][/caption] Just in time for the 100th anniversary of the Korea-Japan Annexation treaty, a Korean scholar has new evidence that the treaty was never properly ratified by the Korean king. Hence, according to the scholar, the 1910 annexation treaty was never legal and Japan's annexation of Korea was illegal (or at least not authorized...

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11 Aug

Hell must have had central air conditioning installed, because I find myself in complete agreement with Ruth Wedgwood's recent post at EJIL: Talk! on Paul Kagame's rapid descent into authoritarianism.  Here is a snippet: The West’s failure to address Tutsi violations of the laws of war has allowed Kagame to conclude, justifiably, that he can do nearly anything with...

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09 Aug

My friend Nancy Combs new book on international tribunals, Fact-Finding Without Facts: The Uncertain Evidentiary Foundations of International Criminal Convictions, has just been published by Cambridge University Press.  Here is the description: Fact-finding Without Facts explores international criminal fact-finding - empirically, conceptually, and normatively. After reviewing thousands of pages of transcripts from various international criminal tribunals, the author...

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08 Aug

El Universal -- along with other newspapers -- is reporting that one of President Uribe's final acts in office was to file a complaint with the ICC alleging that Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, is responsible for permitting FARC guerrillas to use Venezuela as a staging area for crimes committed in Colombia: Jaime Granados, the lawyer of Colombian outgoing president...

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06 Aug

As discussed here, one of the key arguments that the Ecuador plaintiffs are making in response to Chevron’s Motion is that the damaging quotes are being taken out of context. Without question one of the most damning excerpts is when lead plaintiffs’ lawyer Steve Donziger is quoted as saying that “Because at the end of the day, this is...

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04 Aug

The ongoing saga regarding Chevron’s legal travails in Ecuador took an interesting twist this week. As I reported earlier, Chevron has secured key outtakes of the movie Crude that appeared to show alarming collusion between the plaintiff lawyers and the Court-appointed expert. According to pleadings filed yesterday pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 1782, the outtakes include some amazing communications...

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04 Aug

I've argued for the past couple of years that the ICC should open a formal investigation into the situation in Colombia, because it is a non-African situation that satisfies most, if not all, of my criteria for situational gravity: (1) crimes committed with government involvement; (2) systematic criminality; (3) socially alarming crimes such as enforced disappearance and torture.  Here is...

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03 Aug

Adam Serwer has a post up flagging a new suit by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) against the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) over funds expended over the question of whether the Obama administration can designate and then target Al-Awlaki as a terrorist hiding out presumably in Yemen.  (Adam tried to contact me to...

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02 Aug

Justice Ginsburg has fired the latest salvo in the ongoing debate about the Court's use of foreign and international law sources in constitutional adjudication.   On Friday, she gave a speech to the International Academy of Comparative Law at American University, entitled "A decent respect to the Opinions of [Human]kind": The Value of a Comparative Perspective in Constitutional Adjudication.  Not surprisingly given her...

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