On Monday the Ninth Circuit issued one of the most important decisions interpreting the Alien Tort Statute since Sosa. In Sarei v. Rio Tinto, the Ninth Circuit addressed whether corporate liability can apply to human rights abuses committed by Papua New Guinea ("PNG"). Plaintiffs allege that Rio Tinto and the PNG government quelled an uprising in 1990 that...
I missed this item from last week noting that the U.S. Senate gave its approval last Friday to the Council of Europe's Cybercrime Treaty. I have also not been following the debate over the treaty, which is opposed by some civil libertarian types and former Clinton impeachment manager Bob Barr. Here is the basic complaint, which sounds scary enough, but...
I wanted to point out two relatively new websites concerning the UN and international law that have come to my attention. The first is the United Nations and the Individual, a blog co-authored by Otto Spijkers, a Leiden PhD candidate, and Richard Norman, an educator in South Korea with a background in international conflicts. The blog covers a wide...
Earlier this week Justice Kennedy provided the keynote speech at the ABA annual meeting in Hawaii. The speech is pure Kennedy in all his earnestness. The full transcript is not available but the video is here. Here is an excerpt of the speech: We are at another turning point in the history of the law…. [W]e are...
Saturday was the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. Tens of thousands of Japanese thronged Peace Park in downtown Hiroshima to commemorate the attack, which killed nearly 140,000 people. From all accounts, the ceremony was deeply moving, a tribute to the need to abolish nuclear weapons once and for all: During the ceremony, children dressed in black...
An Argentine court has sentenced a former policeman to 25 years imprisonment for "disappearing" a couple and abducting their child in 1978, during Argentina's "Dirty War": A federal court in Buenos Aires sentenced Julio Héctor Simón to 25 years in prison for the illegal arrest and torture of José Poblete Roa and Gertrudis Hlaczik de Poblete, a Chilean/Argentine couple who “disappeared”...
Law Professor Eugene Kontorovich has this thought-provoking op-ed in today's New York Sun arguing that the current proposal for a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon violates a bedrock principle of international law: That nations cannot gain territory through the aggressive use of force. Here's an excerpt: The most surprising aspect of international proposals for a ceasefire in the Israel-Lebanon conflict is...
The AALS National Security Law Section is soliciting papers for the 2007 AALS meeting. The winning paper will be published in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy. The topic: “Prosecuting Leakers and Leakees: The End of National Security Muckraking?” For those of you interested, full details on submissions and the selection process can be found here. ...
Following up on Julian's post below, Uganda has announced that the ICC has agreed not to prosecute the five LRA leaders, including Joseph Kony, as long as the final agreement reached between the government and the LRA does not "condone impunity." Interestingly, Uganda also claims that it only initiated peace talks with the LRA because it could not find a partner...
The much-feared and much-despised Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has declared an immediate and unilateral cease-fire in its long-standing brutal civil war in Uganda. This is good news but it hasn't really solved the looming problem of ICC indictments of four top LRA leaders. Peace talks have apparently been stymied because of these ICC indictments and the ICC Prosecutor...
A report in favor of Transnistrian independence, supposedly written by a non-governmental organization, has been floating around. Take a look at what the Economist found. ...
I have recently been appointed the Book Review Editor -- along with Peter Ramsay, who is a member of the law faculty at LSE -- of the New Criminal Law Review, formerly published as the Buffalo Criminal Law Review. Here is the publisher's description of the journal's mission: Focused on examinations of crime and punishment in domestic, transnational, and international...
