Professor Bell's latest post is extremely unfortunate. Instead of addressing his failure to quote HRW's sentence in its entirety, he not only spins the sentence to somehow support his criticism of the organization, he does so by subtly imputing that criticism to me: If Professor Heller believes that HRW is capable of having seen plausible signs of Hezbollah presence in...
Professor Heller insists that it is "excruciatingly clear" that the NYT sentence that reads "Mr. Kamaleldin, the Sreifa official, estimated that up to two-thirds of the town's homes and buildings were demolished, leaving more than 43 people buried in the rubble" refers to casualties from the August 13 attack alone. Perhaps it is clear to Professor Heller. For the rest of us,...
Once again Professor Bell misstates the August 16 New York Times article on which his argument about Hezbollah fighters depends. The article makes it excruciatingly clear that "43 people" refers not to the total number of casualties in Sreifa during the war, but to the number of casualties in the August 13 attack alone: Just days ago, Israeli warplanes pounded...
One of our frequent readers asked yesterday why delightful events like the APSA Happy Hour never occur on the West coast. Well, I can't quite promise to duplicate that event, but those in southern California may wish to know that on Wednesday, August 30, my home institution will host a symposium on the "Rookie Year of the Roberts Court"...
Another interesting false report of an Israeli war crime has popped up in the blogosphere. According to the ICRC, "on 23 July, at 11.15 pm in Cana, a village in southern Lebanon[, a]ccording to Lebanese Red Cross reports, two of its ambulances were struck by [Israeli] munitions, although both vehicles were clearly marked by the red cross emblem and...
And, finally, in reference to Professor Heller's piece, a little math: According to the HRW figures, at least 23 were killed in the July 13-19 Israeli attacks. According to the NYT story, on August 16, there were 43 total dead of which at list 22 ("most") were Hezbollah/Amal fighters. 43 less 23 is 20, which means that at least 2...
Professor Bell may stand by his critique of Human Rights Watch, but that doesn't make it any more accurate. Quite simply, he has offered almost no evidence that contradicts Ms. Whitson's claim that although Hezbollah fighters might have been in Sreifa during Israel's attack on August 13, there were no Hezbollah fighters there on July 13 and July 19,...
In rereading Ms. Whitson's defense of HRW's evidently false accusations of Israeli war crimes in Srifa, I noticed the following interesting phrase: "We documented ...
Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division, takes issue with my critique of Human Rights Watch's anti-Israel bias. As I noted earlier, I critiqued HRW's accusation that Israel had committed war crimes by bombing the Lebanese village of Srifa, where, according to HRW, there was "no evidence that there had been...
Robert Bork asserts that “judges of international courts . . . are continuing to undermine democratic institutions.” This hostility implies that international courts engage in illegitimate judicial activism. Assuming that international judges do occasionally engage in international lawmaking, does this activity deserve to be dismissed as untoward? It is becoming increasingly clear that states tolerate—and perhaps encourage—international judicial...
One of the issues identified by Tomer Broude in his APSA virtual roundtable introduction is the allocation of rule-determination power between national bodies and international tribunals. He also notes the growing concern of judicial activism by international tribunals, with the WTO Appellate Body as the most notable example. He identifies an emerging international judiciary that represents an international...
I hope readers enjoy the “virtual roundtable” we’re hosting here at Opinio Juris this week in the run-up to the American Political Science Association’s (APSA) annual meeting. And, if you happen to be in Philadelphia for the APSA meeting, we’d like to invite you to a real roundtable of sorts. We’re hosting a happy hour on Friday night,...
