Okay, no sucha thing, as my five-year-old boy would say. It's part of the marvelous counter-historical backdrop to Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The premise is that several million Jews were extended "Ickes passports" early in the war (thus reducing the toll of the Holocaust by two-thirds), a population thereafter swollen by the defeat of...
If you want entry-level work in England, you best polish your Polish. According to this news report, some British citizens allegedly are being turned away from agricultural and factory work in England because they don't speak Polish. "The influx of Eastern European workers means the language is now vital for jobs in agriculture, says MP Malcolm Moss. His...
Vanity Fair has a special issue devoted to the subject. The issue is guest-edited by Bono, with 20 different covers at the newstand featuring evryone from Brad Pitt to Condi Rice to Madonna. I took the $4.50 hit for Opinio Juris readers (our crossover audience is probably in the single digits). What can you say, it's an...
As regular readers know, Julian and I disagree about whether international law promotes or impedes the peacemaking process in war-torn countries. I do not believe that international law is an end in itself, and I acknowledge that in some situations the involvement of international organizations like the ICC can have negative consequences. But I question Julian's assumption that...
The case of Powerex v. Reliant Energy Services presents a delicate procedural question regarding appellate jurisdiction and the FSIA immunity protections. Bottom line: Do federal appellate courts have jurisdiction over FSIA questions (i.e., whether a corporation is a foreign state entity) when an appeal is jurisdictionally barred? The answer from the Supreme Court today is no. The case...
On October 16, 1975, the first full day of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, five journalists — two British, two Australian, and one New Zealander — were killed in the border town of Balibo. The official Indonesian position has always been that the journalists were accidentally killed in a crossfire as they attempted to film Indonesia's invasion of the...
In addition to Julian's comments from last week about the Supreme Court's opinion in India v. New York, I just had one other quick thought about Justice Thomas' majority opinion. It should be underscored that the majority's approach to statutory interpretation appeared quite comfortable in relying on international law. It is not exactly a Charming Betsy case, because...
Sudan announced yesterday that it would agree to a U.N.-led peacekeeping force operated in cooperation with the African Union. The U.N.-led force of 19,000 will eventually be deployed in 2008. No one is getting overly excited about the prospects of this U.N.-led force, and I don't think it is quite yet the solution to the Darfur crisis. Still, it is...
I doubt it, but this report from AP suggests otherwise. If it really turns out to be a problem, it seems like the only fix at this point is an amendment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. That's going to take a while, though. ...
I just stumbled across this article that was posted on an ecommerce website eight months ago about strategies for countering bad news from your foreign business operations (like accusations of complicity with torture and murder, etc.). The piece begins like this:That a labor union at a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Columbia was accusing the company of hiring paramilitary groups...
In what human-rights groups are describing as a landmark case, a military court in Rostov-on-Don has convicted four Russian soldiers — three in absentia — of murdering six unarmed civilians in Chechnya:The case has been followed closely in war-scarred Chechnya, where many are outraged that no one has been brought to justice for the January 2002 killing of a driver...
Human Rights Watch provides more information on François-Xavier Byuma's "trial":Byuma, who heads an organization for the defense of childrens’ rights known as Turengere Abana, had previously investigated allegations that Imanzi had raped a young girl. Imanzi was briefly detained and questioned but never prosecuted for rape. At a first hearing on the genocide charges, Byuma was present, but refused...
