Read Ali Soufan’s op-ed about Zero Dark Thirty today in the New York Times. If you’ve read Ali’s gripping book, his take won’t surprise you. As he puts it: “I watched ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ not as a former F.B.I. special agent who spent a decade chasing, interrogating and prosecuting top members of Al Qaeda but as someone who enjoys Hollywood...
The Syrian opposition, the Syrian National Coalition, is willing to negotiate a peace agreement, but they demand that President Al-Assad cannot be a part of any deal going forward. Syria's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has blamed al-Qaeda affiliated groups for yesterday's deadly blasts in Damascus, and called on the UN to do more to fight terrorism. Japan's Prime Minister Abe is in...
After 15 months, the UN has finally responded to the Haiti Cholera claims brought by lawyers representing over 5000 victims. For background on this massive and tragic case, see my post here. The UN’s rejection was communicated to the claimants' lawyers via this two page letter which relies on a brief reference to the Convention on Privileges and Immunities in support of...
Yesterday, Myanmar held peace talks between ethnic groups in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in an attempt to resolve the ongoing Kachin conflict. British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested to diverting hundreds of millions of pounds sterling from foreign aid into security and defense. A French General appointed to head the EU's mission to Mali urged the EU to equip the "very impoverished" Malian forces,...
An Israeli soldier has caused outrage because of a photo posted to Instagram showing what appears to be a Palestinian child in the crosshairs of his rifle. Chinese government officials considered using a drone to target a suspected drug lord hiding in Myanmar. In other drone news, the United Arab Emirates has signed a contract with the US to purchase approximately $200 million worth of American-made...
Breaking news: China has rejected arbitration under Annex VII of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea with the Philippines, dealing a heavy blow to the future of dispute settlement under UNCLOS (h/t China Law Prof Blog). According to this China Daily report, "Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Ma Keqing had an appointment with officials from the Philippines' Foreign...
Over at the International Economic Law and Policy Blog, Rob Howse brings daily updates of the Seal hearings at the WTO. The New Zealand government has decided to go ahead with plans to introduce plain packaging for tobacco products, but the enactment of the actual legislation could be postponed depending on the outcome of the WTO and arbitration cases pending against similar Australian...
The International Peace Institute (where, in full disclosure, I am spending part of my sabbatical as a Senior Visiting Advisor) has just released a new report entitled Peace, Justice and Reconciliation in Africa. The report, which will be of interest to those who follow the ICC and transitional justice issues, is available here. The report makes two recommendations: 1) The African Union's...
There is an interesting discussion by Stephen Walt over at Foreign Policy on why academic writing is so bad. It is a subject academics are reluctant to discuss, yet there is no doubt that much of what passes as legal scholarship is dull, disagreeable, undigestable. Here's Walt's take: The first problem is that many academics (and especially younger...
Bangladesh has amended its war crimes statute to allow the retrial of cases from 1971 amid protests. Human Rights Watch is concerned that the amendments will threaten the legitimacy of the tribunal. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights is proposing changes to its rules of procedure in order to strengthen the Inter-American system of human rights. ASIL has posted a new Insight on the International Law Issues in the Department...
[Michael W. Lewis is a Professor of Law at Ohio Northern University where he teaches International Law and the Law of War.] In his Hamdan opinion in 2006 Justice Stevens described the conflict between al Qaeda and the United States as a NIAC (his opinion did not address in any way the geographical scope of that NIAC). He then went on to measure the...
I used to blog regularly about the Whale Wars, my name for the ongoing struggle between Japanese Whalers and those groups devoted to protecting whales. But I stopped almost three years ago when Australia filed its case against Japan in the ICJ, since nothing important seems to have happened since then. (Did we really need 22 months for written proceedings, when...
