Noah Feldman has this long think piece in the New York Times Magazine. Feldman deftly describes for an intelligent lay audience a fork-in-the-road moment for the Court and its posture towards international law and institutions. We have the sovereigntists on the one hand and the internationalists on the other. Each had a major win last Term, the internationalists with Boumediene...
Shocking: An Army prosecutor has resigned from the Guantánamo war court in a crisis of conscience over plans to try a young Afghan accused of throwing a grenade rather than settle the case out of court, according to an affidavit filed with the court Wednesday. Army Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a reservist from the Pittsburgh area, becomes the fourth known prosecutor to...
The trial of Charles Taylor's son, "Chuckie," for acts of torture committed in Liberia began today in Miami: Chuckie Taylor is the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, who is on trial for war crimes by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone. The son is accused of responsibility for torture committed between 1997 and 2003 while he headed Liberia’s...
Apparently, France will no longer even insist that the Sudan try Haroun and Kushayb. It only wants Haroun to be removed from his government position: France had previously stressed that Sudan must turn over Ahmed Haroun, state minister for humanitarian affairs, and militia commander Ali Mohamed Ali Abdel-Rahman, also know as Ali Kushayb who are wanted by the ICC in connection...
The Seventh Circuit in Osagiede v. United States earlier this month ruled that an attorney's failure to provide information as to the client's Vienna Convention rights may constitute ineffective assistance of counsel. Effective performance by counsel representing a foreign national in a criminal proceeding is reasonable performance “under prevailing professional norms.” ...
Last week, I defended deferring the ICC's investigation of Bashir for a year in exchange for, inter alia, the Sudanese government turning Harun and Kushayb over to the ICC for prosecution. That would have been a strong demand on the part of France and the UK -- one that, I argued, Bashir would be unlikely to accept. Lest they be accused...
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...
