In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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01 Nov

This according to AP: The sentence was handed down Sunday under a plea bargain in which the young Canadian admitted to five war crimes charges, including killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Under the deal, the judge was limited to the eight-year sentence and had to ignore the recommendation of a military jury that Khadr serve 40...

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31 Oct

Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing.  Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...

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29 Oct

I spent the day at Georgetown University Law Center, at a seminar put on by Georgetown and the Queen's University Belfast School of Law, on Professor Vicki Jackson's splendid new book, Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era.  Fabulous small discussion seminar with comparative constitutional law scholars from around the planet, and a fine discussion of the book.  This book partly...

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29 Oct

William Gibson (appropriating Gertrude Stein's bon mot about Oakland, California) said of cyberspace: "there is no there, there."  While this captured the feeling of Gibson's fictional cyberpunk protagonists, it obscures all the physical "theres" that make cyberspace possible.  A student post at Infranet Lab called Re-Link:The Physical Network of Data is a quick visual primer on all the stuff of cyberspace...

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28 Oct

Last week I had the privilege to attend an investment arbitration conference and FDI moot court competition at Pepperdine. Kudos to Murdoch University of Australia for winning the competition and my alma mater NYU for winning the highest overall ranking. There was much to ponder in the conference from the likes of Andrea Bjorkland, Todd Weiler, Anna Joubin-Bret...

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27 Oct

I wanted to let readers know that I am no longer associated with the Karadzic defense team, either formally or informally.  Being involved in the case was a remarkable experience, one that I will always value.  I wish the defense team well -- and more importantly, I wish Dr. Karadzic a fair trial....

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26 Oct

Omar Khadr accepted a plea deal yesterday that called for him to plead guilty to all of the charges against him in exchange for serving one more year at Gitmo and then being repatriated to Canada to serve another seven years in prison.  Predictably, the government is claiming that the guilty plea is proof that Khadr is factually guilty; as...

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26 Oct

Interest in targeted killing and drone warfare is not letting up in intensity to judge by the pace of events on the topic. Right on top of my debate with Mary Ellen O'Connell on this at Washington University two weeks ago, Mary Ellen and Ben Wittes undertook another one, this past Saturday at International Law Weekend in New York.  It was considerably more testy than the Washington University debate.  Some in the audience were unhappy with the confrontational nature of the exchange; some thought it refreshingly direct; my view is the latter and congratulations to Vincent Vitkowsky for an excellent job of moderating the debate.  I'm sure it will generate a lot of interest and a lot of pushback in several directions.  Ben has posted up video of the event at Lawfare. Ben has also added a second post with some transcription, specifically on the question of whether, if one takes Mary Ellen's statements at what they say, Barack Obama is not therefore a "serial killer" for having directly ordered the CIA to carry out what Mary Ellen characterizes as "crimes" and Harold Koh at the least an aider and abetter.  Ben has in mind, for example, statements in Mary Ellen's widely noticed article, "Unlawful Killing with Combat Drones," which among other things declares that "members of the CIA are not lawful combatants and their participation in killing—even in an armed conflict—is a crime."  One might argue Ben's choice of provocative words in the debate - serial killing - or one might argue various technical points over whether it is murder or not murder, whether or not there can be the proper intent given the presumed opinions of many lawyers advising inside the government (many of those questions came up, of course, in the detention-interrogation-rendition arguments as well).  His fundamental point is to say, as far as I understand it (and if I do, I agree), if you declare that CIA participation is a crime, then it follows that somewhere there is a perpetrator.  Not to go after him or her is to permit impunity; it is not a matter of saying, well, you are committing crimes, but all we want to do is persuade you to change your policies going forward to bring you into compliance with international law.  Crime is a charge of more than mere non-compliance.  If there is a crime, someone must be responsible for doing it, whether you call it murder, criminal extrajudicial execution, what have you. And whether one calls these crimes serial killing, murder, extrajudicial execution, etc., they are still a large number of killings. It's not the kind of crime that just happens to be a tort or civil infraction criminalized, but for which as a regulatory matter one can simply agree not to do it any more, like various of the lesser environmental "crimes" for which corporations routinely pay criminal fines in the domestic United States.  Killing is not like that, presumably, at least not when it's systematic, systemic, large-scale, and under direct orders. The article by Mary Ellen specifically says who commits a crime - members of the CIA.  Yet they are not acting as rogues in this, but rather under direct orders of the President.  If it is correct to call the acts a crime, then it is correct to identify the criminals, and those criminals will have to include those who ordered them to do the crimes.  So what is it to be?  I think it a salutary reminder that one ought to be careful in cranking up the machinery of international criminal law over contested interpretations of international law. One risks either over-invoking it or trivializing it or both.  I take it that was Ben's larger point in seeking to force the question onto the table by insisting on using an ordinary, non-legal term like serial killing.
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23 Oct

Although everyone is justly excited about International Law Weekend, I wanted to mention another conference in New York that took place yesterday at Brooklyn Law School, Governing Civil Society: NGO Accountability, Legitimacy and Influence.  Congratulations to Professors Claire R. Kelly and Dana Brakman Reiser at BLS for putting it together.  I was on one of the panels at this one day session and there were many other terrific people who represented a quite fascinating and too-rare mingling of the international law and nonprofit law worlds.  As someone who cuts across both, I thought this was a great conference. The issue that drove it was to ask (this is my summary) whether there is a way to bring together two basic questions about non-governmental organizations and nonprofit organizations in the international world, the transnational world, the global space: accountability in the sense of large political legitimacy, and accountability in the sense that is usually meant in non-profit and charitable organization law.  So one panel addressed the interactions of NGOs and international organizations; a second addressed models of governance and regulation of NGOs; and the last panel asked whether and how legitimacy and accountability might be linked. One of the takeaways for me was that the question of the legitimacy and governance function of international NGOs, global civil society, is still a salient question.  I have long criticized (very sharply) the suggestion that international NGOs ought to have a legitimacy function within the international system, which is to say, a role in governance, even if you think, as I do not, that liberal international global governance is a good idea.  But I had mostly stopped writing on this theme, except when specifically invited (here and here, for example), because I had thought that the idea had died away.  That was something I thought I had learned from Anne-Marie Slaughter's impressive A New World Order; she specifically rejects the global civil society-international organization partnership in governance as failing basic tests of legitimacy (I discuss this in a long review of the book).  Instead, focus seemed to have shifted to the also important question of NGO accountability with respect to the performance of their own missions - internal governance of international NGOs, their relationships with governments in their operational work, and questions that implicate accountability and governance about them as institutions, not global governance. More recently, however, I have realized that something that I thought had faded away as a model project in global governance is still around, somewhat incorporated into some of theories of global constitutionalism that have been a staple of European academic writing on global governance for many years.  But definitely active once again as a proposed theory of global governance and legitimacy.  So I guess I am back writing about it again.  I am no more in favor of it than I ever was, I'm afraid.  Of the academic international law writers in this area, the one who seems to me the most important is Steve Charnovitz of GW, who presented a very interesting paper at this conference.  Steve always offers a careful and measured view, and this paper was exactly that, but also exceedingly interesting not just in the critique of critics like me, but in offering a step forward in a positive account of NGOs in governance.  Indeed, in some respects it was quietly the most audacious of the papers at the seminar, because Steve set out the form of an argument for asking how anyone could propose to leave the NGOs out.  I will very much look forward to reading the essay when published in the symposium issue.
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