Yesterday, on Monday, September 22, the 63rd UN General Assembly meetings got underway. As an annual confab, it features a parade of speeches by heads of state and foreign ministers and the Secretary General. This year had a couple of special items. One was President Bush's farewell address at the UN. A second-US-centric event was the arrival of Governor Sarah...
I have posted a new essay on SSRN, "Situational Gravity Under the Rome Statute," which is forthcoming in Future Directions in International Criminal Justice, a book that Carsten Stahn and Larissa van den Herik are editing for TMC Asser/Cambridge University Press. Here is the abstract: The ICC is often derided as the “African Criminal Court.” That criticism cannot easily be dismissed:...
(Update, Saturday, September 27, 2008. As a reminder that credit markets and banks are globally interlinked, note that even as WaMu fell in the United States and was taken over by the FDIC, in Europe the Dutch-Belgium Fortis Group (banking and insurance) was under major pressure and might well fall by early next week. Major pressure means that market investors...
Two interesting trials involving very old defendants began last week. The first, in Poland, involves General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who orchestrated the Polish government's brutal repression of Solidarity in 1981: The 85-year-old man, who was once the very symbol of communist repression, faces a possible ten-year jail sentence for “directing a criminal organisation” – a reference to the Military Council that imposed...
The letters section of the Times is probably not long for the world but it does still have the function of pulling out pithy representative statements from what would otherwise be lost in the haystack of the paper's website comments section. So here's this from Northwestern University lawprof Steve Calabresi on Adam Liptak's excellent piece from Friday on the flagging international stature of...
Paul Kennedy’s book on the history and future of the United Nations, Parliament of Man, appeared in 2006. A Spanish translation appeared in late 2007, which I review in a (very) long essay (some 10,000 words, be warned) appearing in Spanish in the Revista de Libros (Madrid), November 2008 issue. The Revista, for which I serve as political science advising editor is one of the best...
The New York Times and Washington Post (and lots of other places) report today (Saturday, September 20, 2008) that the two senior executives of the Human Rights Watch Americas Division, executive director Jose Miguel Vivanco and deputy director Daniel Wilkinson, were detained by Venezuelan security personnel in Caracas and placed on a plane to Brazil. From the NYT: Armed men in uniforms...
The oft-discussed relationship of the United States and International Law will be the theme of this year's International Law Weekend of the American Branch of the International Law Association. The conference will be held October 16-18, 2008, at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, 42 West 44th Street, New York City. The kick-off panel will focus...
A couple of years ago, I examined whether popular conceptions of the current Bush Administration's disdain for treaties had quantitative support. I found to my surprise that the Bush Administration did not appear to be concluding significantly fewer treaties (whether solely pursuant to Article II or to all forms of U.S. agreement-making combined). Looking just at Article II treaty activity in...
I want to follow up Roger's post on law professor sign on amicus briefs with a really basic, genuinely naive question. I am not a litigator and do not know very much about litigation. I have never really understood the rationale behind courts accepting amicus briefs - law professor briefs, or any other kind. I'm not putting this as a...
This past month I received an email sent to over 60 law professors inviting us to join an amicus brief. The case is before the D.C. Circuit and involves the important issue of corporate responsibility for human rights violations under international law. The email was sent at approximately midnight on a Monday night and invited a distinguished group...
Two months ago, I predicted that the Security Council would not have the votes necessary to defer the ICC's prosecution of Bashir. Nostradamus I'm not: In a last-ditch attempt to prevent ICC judges from issuing an arrest warrant for Bashir in the next few weeks, Bashir's supporters - the Arab League, the African Union, China and Russia - will use the...
