There is an interesting discussion going on at Alex De Waal's blog Making Sense of Darfur about the various theories of liability that might be used to hold Bashir responsible for genocide. The discussion as a whole is well worth checking out; what I want to discuss here is whether Bashir could be convicted of genocide via JCE III, so-called...
Because he says things like this: [The ICC] has not opened investigations with regard to Russia's alleged war crimes in Chechnya and Georgia, where thousands of innocent civilians were killed. Nor has it opened investigations with regard to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, the Congo and other places where civilians are routinely targeted as part of military and terrorist campaigns. That will...
Alexander Cooley of Barnard College and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University has an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune looking into how and why the U.S. is in the process of losing its air base in Kyrgyzstan. The story really gives a sense of the brass tacks of the so-called New Great Game: actually a not-so-great game of payoffs, more payoffs, threats, and...
Typically, I wouldn't take this kind of thing very seriously. The Palestinian Authority is pressing the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate accusations of war crimes committed by Israeli commanders during the recent war in Gaza. But in a clever move, the Palestinian Authority has accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC over its territory, which includes Gaza. This could in...
I love this recent article by Stanley Fish on the abuse of tenure: Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or...
I'm not at all surprised by this. Barack Obama's justice department has repeated a Bush administration policy of citing "state secrets" to prevent the release of evidence concerning extraordinary renditions. The decision, revealed at a hearing in a San Francisco appeals court, came days after the British high court ruled that evidence of renditions and torture must remain secret so as not to endanger the intelligence...
[Opinio Juris is pleased to present this essay by Professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern Law School on the relationship between international law and anti-piracy efforts. Please be sure to click "continue reading" to read the whole essay.] The successful ransom by Somali pirates of a Ukrainian freighter laden with arms and armor is indicative of the broader failure of the...
John Louth at OUP has kindly alerted me to the existence of a new blog that will no doubt be of interest to our readers: the International Criminal Law Bureau. Members include well-known practitioners and scholars, including Steven Kay, QC, and Guénaël Mettraux (of whom I'm a big fan). The blog is part of a larger project by the same name. ...
I have been meaning to do a post about the Supreme Court's first antidumping decision in decades, but frankly the case is a yawner. The question in United States v. Eurodif is whether the importation of low enriched uranium (LEU) is a good or a service. If it is the latter, then it cannot be subject to antidumping...
The Wall Street Journal has an article today, February 6, 2009, front page, on the rush by states to enact new trade barriers in all sorts of ways. The WTO is expressing great concern, indeed saying that it is unable even to keep up with tracking the barriers being erected. The landscape is moving so fast that officials at the WTO,...
Well, the rumors have now officially made it to the blogosphere. Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh is (at the very least) on someone's short list to take over from John Bellinger as the next Legal Adviser at the Department of State. See it here in TNR, which got it from no less a source than the Yale Daily News....
Sometimes reporters and their editors get caught up in a narrative, and forget to check facts. In the case of Obama and Bush, every Obama pronouncement is presumed to represent a reversal of Bush policy. But this is simply not true (see, e.g., the predictable and apparently uncontroversial Obama retention of Bush policies on "extraordinary rendition" and airstrikes in Pakistan). And so it...
