In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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03 Dec

Crossborder remittance payments by immigrant workers to their relatives back home are an increasingly important capital movement in the world, especially among poor people.  The United States, for example, has sometimes treated remittance payments as part of its calculations of international aid public and private.  It has only recently started to receive academic attention, however.  My colleague Ezra Rosser has...

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03 Dec

No less an authoritative source than the Wall Street Journal reports that outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff may be rethinking his views on what makes for effective counterterrorism strategy. The Bush administration's point man in protecting America against terrorism says U.S. investments in safety should not be restricted to airport screening machines or border fences. Michael Chertoff says the...

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03 Dec

Last month the Supreme Court rendered its latest installment on the issue of judicial supervision of national security. Winter v. NRDC has received surprisingly little attention, but it strikes me as an important example of judicial deference to the Executive Branch in military affairs. This language in particular is noteworthy: We “give great deference to the professional judgment of...

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02 Dec

Chevron wins a big Alien Tort Statute verdict in a case involving its alleged complicity in killings by Nigerian security forces. This is no doubt an important case (though probably not as important at Andrew McCarthy thinks it is -- see "Sovereignty, Vindicated" over at NRO).  On the heels of a lower-profile case last year involving Drummond that...

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02 Dec

An association of 15 human-rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the Save Darfur Coalition, released a devastating report today on the Sudanese government's cynical -- and mendacious -- PR campaign to convince the international community that it is committed to bringing peace to Darfur.  Here is a snippet of the executive summary: This report focuses on four...

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02 Dec

The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has a must-read article today about how ordinary Darfuris view the OTP's decision to seek arrest warrants for the rebel leaders allegedly responsible for killing 12 peacekeepers in 2007.  According to the article -- and all the usual caveats about anecdotal evidence apply -- the response is uniformly negative: Yasir, an IDP (internally displaced...

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01 Dec

Remarkable story in today's Wall Street Journal, front page, December 1, 2008, about a Latvian economist arrested and held for several days - not finally charged - for expressing pessimistic sentiment about the stability of the Latvian financial system: How to Combat a Banking Crisis: First, Round Up the Pessimists   Latvian Agents Detain a Gloomy Economist; 'It Is a Form of Deterrence' I have stuck...

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01 Dec

Violence in Kenya following the disputed 2007 elections left more than 1,300 people dead and more than 500,000 internally displaced.  Last month, Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence released a 527-page report -- the Waki Report -- that concluded much of the violence was planned and organized by members of Kenya's security agencies, business leaders, politicians, and government officials. ...

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01 Dec

Going forward I need to remember that if I'm ever looking for a quick topic about which to blog, I just need to take a look at the latest developments from the UK on surveillance. First there was using ubiquitous surveillance to make art.  Now there's surveillance imitating art...

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30 Nov

Georgetown Security Law Brief blog has a super-useful roundup of what a wide variety of people have said about what to do about detainees at Guantanamo.  It goes backwards by date, with op eds, articles, blog posts, all sorts of stuff, including stuff from here at OJ.  If you want to know what the state of discussion is as of...

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29 Nov

Well, not really Stendhal on Thanksgiving.  Stendhal never visited the United States, but that did not inhibit him from expressing a great many opinions about the place (mostly negative observations in the 'nation of shopkeepers' vein), particularly in the entire chapter devoted to love in the United States in that curious book-length essay, On Love.   Stendhal was highly skeptical...

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