In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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25 Jul

Well, that's exactly what the Obama Administration did this past Wednesday.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed the 1976 ASEAN Treaty of Amity and Cooperation (TAC) on behalf of the United States with the intention that her signature serve as the requisite act of accession, bringing the treaty immediately into force for the United States.  Now, the treaty does not commit the United States...

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24 Jul

The Rwandan government announced today that it will stop taking new gacaca cases as of July 31st and that it intends to wind down gacaca operations within five months. Gacaca is a traditional local justice procedure (gacaca roughly means “justice on the grass” in Kinyarwanda) that the government modified to process the staggering number of low-level genocide cases and...

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24 Jul

For critics of universal jurisdiction, Spain's UJ statute has become the poster child for accusations of excess. How strange it seems that roughly ten years ago it was so widely celebrated as the provision that brought down General Augusto Pinochet. Spain's indicting the former Chilean dictator and Britain's detaining him on the attendant arrest warrant and extradition request...

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23 Jul

A couple of weeks ago, Sweden did something unprecedented for an EU nation -- it indicated it would proceed with the extradition of an accused Rwandan génocidaire to Kigali. Sylvere Ahorugeze, a 53-year-old former director of Rwanda's civil aviation authority, is implicated in the 1994 murder of a group of civilians in the Kigali suburb of Gikondo. He...

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23 Jul

According to a national poll conducted by Time, now that Walter Cronkite is dead, John Stewart is America's most trusted newscaster.  Stewart, 44%.  Brian Williams, 29%.  Charlie Gibson, 19%.  Katie Couric: 7%. (I guess I shouldn't mock.  If those were the choices, I'd have voted for him, too.)...

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22 Jul

You probably know which blogs have the most traffic from Paul Caron’s “Law Prof Blog Rankings.” But I bet you have no idea which law blogs are the best read, that is, the ones that have “sticky” readership. If you take Paul Caron’s Top Law Prof Blog rankings and rank the blogs based on the “average visit length”...

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22 Jul

Related to my post yesterday about the presence requirement for invoking universal jurisdiction (with respect to the UK's new genocide law amendment), QC Ken Macdonald (visiting professor at the London School of Economics) has proposed in The Times an interesting possible solution to deal with what I would call the "Colin Powell" (or, per Macdonald, "Henry Kissinger") dilemma: Of course a...

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21 Jul

My thanks to Deb for her post on the Preliminary Report.  I won't rehash what she said; I just wanted to offer a few thoughts on the military commissions and the detention policy.  First, I think it is interesting that the Obama administration seems to be conceding that "material support for terrorism" is not a violation of the laws of...

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21 Jul

It has been a fascinating two weeks blogging here, and I certainly learned a lot. Some outstanding questions I haven't answered, but unfortunately tomorrow I must turn from these duties to more tedious legal tasks -- jury duty. Thank you  the OpinioJurists for having me....

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