The head of the U.N.'s Electoral Assistance Division is being accused of permitting or creating an "abusive" environment full of sexual innuendo and intimidation in a recent preliminary report commissioned by the U.N. Sounds like fairly standard hostile workplace environment claims, except the U.N. is not subject to U.S. sexual harassment laws. Indeed, it is unclear exactly what...
Julian's earlier post about his experiences at the Vis International Arbitration Moot competition got me thinking about the rather strained ways in which international lawyers continue to cling to distinctions between private and public interactions, a reflection of an unnecessarily rigid "private v. Public" jurisprudence. (Okay, I will admit his post also got me thinking about my semester in Vienna...
There is an excellent new foreign policy blog called Democracy Arsenal that is focused not only on current issues in international affairs but also on elucidating a progressive foreign policy. The bloggers have experience in government service, political campaigns, NGOs, and private enterprise. I know one of the writers, Suzanne Nossel, I think her writing is incisive and intelligent....
In its Second Interim Report, the Volcker Commission has exonerated Kofi Annan of any wrongdoing in relation to the award of a $10 million dollar contract to Cotecna, a Swiss company that employed his son, although he report does question Annan's handling of the affair. The BBC report is here.According to CNN:"There is no evidence that the selection of...
My ubiquitous colleague Eric Freedman, who has in the past 10 days testified on the Terry Schiavo case before Congress and consulted in the Medellin case, passes along this info about yet another one of his cases. Judge Henry H. Kennedy of the D.C. federal district court has granted a preliminary injunction preventing the Defense Department from transferring...
Having failed to motivate myself to get down to D.C. for oral argument in Medellin, and being too cheap to shell out the money for an instant transcript, I will have to content myself with reviewing the several very interesting press accounts of the argument at SCOTUSBlog, Slate, Law.com, and the NYT. All of these accounts seem to agree that...
Professor Barry Carter of Georgetown University Law Center recently posted onto the American Society of International Law’s listserve that the 2005 National Defense Strategy, undersigned by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld states the following in the section assessing America’s vulnerabilities:“Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international...
Today, the Supreme Court finally hears oral argument in the Medellin case. I don’t have much more to add than what SCOTUSBlog has reported here, but it strikes me that Texas is again in a very difficult position, mostly because of their own high-risk litigation strategy and also because of Medellin’s clever and effective approach.By filing a motion to stay...
Readers of my skeptical blog posts on internationalism (here and here) might be surprised and amused that I spent the past week in the heart of Old Europe at a classically internationalist confab: the Willem C. Vis International Arbitration Moot Competition. The Vis Moot draws students and lawyers from 47 different countries to Vienna to participate in arbitration...
Daniel Drezner has a post (and there are some equally interesting comments) on the ousting of the President of Kyrgyzstan. He asks whether the news from Kyrgyzstan and the recent events in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and Afghanistan are the first hints of a new “wave” of democratization, in the sense popularized by Samuel Huntington’s book The Third Wave.I hope that...
In the ongoing saga of Augusto Pinochet, the Supreme Court of Chile found that he had Head of State immunity that prevented from his being prosecuted for the killing of his predecessor, General Carlos Prats. See the BBC report here. Pinochet is also being investigated for human rights abuses under Operation Condor, which persecuted and killed left-wing opponents during the...
Last week's Economist has this excellent article (sub. req'd) summarizing some important empirical studies being done on failed states and post-conflict state building. The conclusions of a raft of recent studies give grounds for optimism: failed states and those on the brink of failure (sometimes called "Low-income countries under stress" or LICUS) can be saved with relatively low investments in...
