Kudos to the State Department for launching the Digital Outreach Team, a.k.a. the Foggy Bottom Bloggers. As reported here, they are doing marvelous work spreading the message of tolerance and dialogue to Middle East blogs frequented by radical Muslims. The team concentrates on about a dozen mainstream Web sites such as chat rooms set up by the BBC and Al...
For those of you not blessed (or cursed) to live in the New York area, you may not have noticed the chorus of local outrage over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's request to visit "Ground Zero", the site of the former World Trade Center in New York during his attendance at the U.N. General Assembly opening session next month. I actually...
Now you too can become a micro-lender to the working poor with Kiva. I just learned about Kiva this past week and I find it just incredible. As the websites describes it, "Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a...
The Guardian (UK) has a fascinating article today about opposition within the ICTY to the UN's purported intention to replace the chief ICTY prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, with Serge Brammertz, a deputy prosecutor at the ICC and the head of the UN commission investigating the murder of Lebanase Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. According to the article, the ICTY's...
As part of its completion strategy, the ICTR intends to transfer 41 cases to national jurisdictions. Most of the transfers will be to Rwanda, which recently eliminated the death penalty. The ICTR has already requested four such transfers: Ildephonse Hategekimana, Gaspard Kanyarukiga, Yussuf Munyakazi, and Fulgence Kayishema. The ICTR's efforts to transfer cases to other national jurisdictions, however, have...
Chapman lawprof John Hall has a curious op-ed in the WSJ (subscription required) attacking the Cambodia hybrid war crimes court. He calls it "another U.N. corruption scandal in the making." But this is really unfair to the U.N. (and when was the last time I wrote that sentence, maybe never?) Professor Hall is really arguing that the problem with...
An arbitral tribunal set up according to Annex VII of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea made public a judgment yesterday settling a border dispute between Guyana and Suriname involving an oil-rich underwater basin (full judgment here). A Canadian oil company, CGX, had been exploring the basin only to be expelled by Surinamese gunboats back in...
I've long suggested that the ICC arrest warrants in Darfur will likely be forgotten or abandoned in favor of pursuing a comprehensive peace deal for Darfur. Earlier this week, Kevin pointed out U.N. Secretary General Ban-ki Moon did privately raise the issue of outstanding ICC arrest warrants for alleged Sudanese war criminals during his visit to Sudan. But...
Just as he did at the spring meeting, Hillel Neuer of UN Watch yesterday called out the UN Human Rights Council for falling back into the bad patterns of the old UN Human Rights Commission -- including adopting nearly identically worded agenda items against Israel, a practice the UN Department of Public Affairs and senior UN human rights officials have...
It's the time of year when a fair number of second year students doing law review are contemplating the project that lies ahead -- drafting a note of their very own. Several students have asked me for advice on the writing process, and I've been pleased to refer them to a new book by Austen Parrish and Dennis Yokoyama,...
The United States is frequently described as an international outlier on human rights. Numerous books and articles have been written bemoaning American exceptionalism. But is it true? I have been thinking a fair bit about comparative law recently and it strikes me that the only valid way to describe the United States as a constitutional outlier is...
Not quite as crazy as it sounds. More Americans are living abroad (estimates run as high as five million), and they are more politically active. As reported on this NPR segment, Rudolph Giuliani held a fundraiser yesterday in London — apparently the first time that a presidential candidate has held such an event outside the United States. ...
