The ICC has formally approved the ICC Prosecutor's request for an arrest warrant against Sudan's President. Kevin's post below discusses what the theory of criminal liability will be, although the actual warrant is not yet public, so we'll have to wait to see if Kevin is right about joint criminal enterprise liability. I still think that this arrest warrant is unwise and...
Because he says things like this: [The ICC] has not opened investigations with regard to Russia's alleged war crimes in Chechnya and Georgia, where thousands of innocent civilians were killed. Nor has it opened investigations with regard to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, the Congo and other places where civilians are routinely targeted as part of military and terrorist campaigns. That will...
Typically, I wouldn't take this kind of thing very seriously. The Palestinian Authority is pressing the International Criminal Court in The Hague to investigate accusations of war crimes committed by Israeli commanders during the recent war in Gaza. But in a clever move, the Palestinian Authority has accepted the jurisdiction of the ICC over its territory, which includes Gaza. This could in...
I love this recent article by Stanley Fish on the abuse of tenure: Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or...
I'm not at all surprised by this. Barack Obama's justice department has repeated a Bush administration policy of citing "state secrets" to prevent the release of evidence concerning extraordinary renditions. The decision, revealed at a hearing in a San Francisco appeals court, came days after the British high court ruled that evidence of renditions and torture must remain secret so as not to endanger the intelligence...
Well, the rumors have now officially made it to the blogosphere. Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh is (at the very least) on someone's short list to take over from John Bellinger as the next Legal Adviser at the Department of State. See it here in TNR, which got it from no less a source than the Yale Daily News....
Chris mentioned earlier the NPR interview with Brookings Institution scholar PW Singer on his new book, Wired for War. I am naturally reading the book as we speak, but for those wanting a useful, clear, short take from Singer himself, check out the Winter 2009 issue of the Wilson Quarterly, and Singer's cover article, "Robots at War: The New Battlefield."...
The Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation may be well and good as a desk reference, but the Voice of America (VOA) Pronunciation Guide does them one better: Online MP3 files for checking the pronunciation of the names of foreign leaders and public figures in the news. So, if like me you are checking to be sure your pronunciation of Vojislav...
My Washington College of Law colleague, Darren Hutchinson - a brilliant and distinguished scholar in constitutional law, jurisprudence, critical race theory and identity theory - takes on Human Rights Watch for the apparent shift in position on rendition it took under the Bush administration and long-time Washington advocacy director Tom Malinowski's comments on rendition under the Obama administration, as reported...
Ever responsive to the needs of our readership, Opinio Juris underwent some minor surgery this weekend, upgrading our server and tweaking a few of our features. We anticipate that our new server will speed up the blog and eliminate some of the pesky service interruptions we have experienced in the past couple of months. As you will note, we have...
The American Society of International Law has announced that the annual Pace Law School International Criminal Court Moot Competition, which is being held this weekend, is now the North American qualifying round for the ICC Trial Competition held in The Hague. The North American qualifying round is open to teams from the U.S, Canada, and Mexico. The global rounds at the Hague will...
I'm grateful to Professor Ochoa for her thoughtful contribution. By way of reply to her post, I want to mention a couple of issues that I think are difficult puzzles for those of us who write in this area. First, I particularly like Professor Ochoa's suggestion that I include information about corruption and governance when assessing whether a SWF should be...
