As Kevin notes, the ICC Appeals Chamber has overruled the Pre-Trial Chamber on the question of whether Sudan's President Bashir can be charged with genocide. In a very useful note, Chile Eboe-Osuji points out here that the Appeals Chamber did not in fact provide the Pre-Trial Chamber with guidance on what standard it should adopt to determine whether there was...
I've been on blog-silence the last few months, but one of my students today made me feel a little guilty about my lack of blogging, so I'm back (at least for now). So while not wanting to interrupt this great online symposium, I'll just point our readers to this remarkable little exchange between U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair...
I intend to closely follow the reactions to the Appeals Chamber's decision on the genocide charges against Bashir. The pushback has already begun in a predictable place: the Making Sense of Darfur blog, which has led the charge against the arrest warrant. The post itself, in which David Barsoum asks "what is the ICC really after in Sudan?", is not...
As I predicted, the Appeals Chamber has rejected the Pre-Trial Chamber's interpretation of the "reasonable grounds" standard: Appeals judges said the court was wrong to conclude in March that there was insufficient evidence to merit charging al-Bashir with three genocide counts. Instead, it had charged him with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for allegedly...
I would first like to thank Professor Guy Mundlak for generously taking the time to respond to my Article, and Opinio Juris for hosting this forum. Professor Mundlak is very correct to note that over time civil liberties and socioeconomic matters have become more intertwined. What’s more, the overlapping identities and realms in which workers function mean that to be protected...
[Guy Mundlak is a Professor at Tel Aviv University Buchmann School of Law] I opted for law school because I wanted to take part in the practice of human rights. Several years later I found myself deeply engrossed in the study of labor law. At the time, Israel was still considered to be strongly collective, solidary, and densely covered by collective...
Thank you to Professor Corn for his exceptionally thoughtful response to the article. His observations illustrate vividly, and persuasively, the apparent choices undergirding the traditional approach my Article critiques. I’ll reply briefly to some of his comments and conclude by highlighting what I perceive to be larger issues in the law of war that our dialogue might provoke. Professor Corn casts...
[Geoffrey Corn is an Associate Professor at South Texas College of Law] Let me begin by extending my compliments to Prof. Watts for his exceptionally well-written article, and my thanks for his suggestion that I provide comment. I am also grateful to my friends at Opinio Juris for extending this opportunity to me—it is nice to be back! CNA obviously represents one...
A note to our readers: I inadvertently jumped the gun a bit in my earlier post about the Security Council and raised Professor Michael Glennon's YJIL article, The Blank Prose Crime of Aggression, on which Kevin has also commented. We imagine that some readers will also want to weigh in. It turns out that in March, we will be discussing...
I want to offer two thoughts on Glennon's article, which -- though I am generally skeptical of the ICC's attempts to define the crime -- I find anything but convincing. The first has to do with his central thesis: that the Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression's proposed definition of aggression "would constitute a crime in blank prose...
Cross-posted at Balkinization Ok, the headline is a bit misleading. It’s only two justices – Scalia and Thomas – who, in dissenting from a denial of certiorari by the Supreme Court this week, argued that the Court should settle once and for all whether detainees can invoke the Geneva Conventions in federal court. Lyle Denniston, as usual, reports the dissent-from-denial here,...
