A federal court in Washington D.C. ruled this week that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) applies to government conduct at Guantanomo Bay. The decision in Rasul v. Rumsfeld, (2006 WL 1216668) is not yet available online. The plaintiffs are detainees who allege various violations of RFRA, including harassment while worshipping, the shaving of their religious beards,...
If anyone out there still believes that Iraq "reconstruction" is about something other than enriching the Republican party's corporate cronies, read this post, which explains how the White House and the Republican majority are making sure that new funds cannot be audited by the Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstruction, who had committed the most mortal of all sins in...
That’s going to be the question facing the new U.N. Human Rights Council when it convenes for the first time June 19 in Geneva, Switzerland. Yesterday, the U.N. General Assembly elected the first 47 members of the newly-created Council. It will replace the much-maligned Human Rights Commission, which achieved notoriety for letting the wolves guard the proverbial hen house (i.e.,...
Time to maybe shorten the posts a wee, wee dram, no? I’m delighted to guest for Opinio Juris in part because it does such a great job of keeping me up to date on international legal developments. And there are other high quality sites in the blogosphere that you might want to add to your RSS feed provider: - the...
The Rwandan government has asked Emmanuel Bagambiki, the former Prefect of Cyangugu, to turn himself in to Rwandan authorities to stand trial on rape charges. Bagambiki was recently acquitted by the ICTR of genocide and crimes against humanity, but is still in the care of the Tribunal because he has been unable to find a country willing to take...
By any measure the letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is significant. It is the first direct contact between the leaders of Iran and the United States since the Iranian Revolution. Over twenty-fives years of silence. And then comes this most unusual letter. There are several things that struck me as remarkable about the letter. First, Ahmadinejad's...
The European Journal of International Law’s most recent issue contains a symposium on global administrative law, an area of vigorous scholarly interest of late, premised on the observation that, as Benedict Kingsbury and Nico Krisch put it, “much of global governance can be understood as regulation and administration.” Because this sort of governance – ranging from informal international agreements...
Allegations of sexual abuse continue to plague peacekeepers and aid workers in Africa. A study conducted by Save the Children, based on interviews with more than 300 people, has concluded that selling young women for sex has reached epidemic proportions in Liberian camps for the displaced: The children and adults who participated in the study were very open and...
Andrew Sullivan notes here the release of the Kings College London annual report on rates of imprisonment around the world. Here is the link. Sullivan summarizes: The rates are given as the number of prison inmates per 100,000 people in the population at large. It's pretty staggering that by far the highest rates of imprisonment occur in the U.S....
The U.S. has filed an extradition request for Isaac Kwame Amuah, Nelson Mandela's son in-law, with the South African government. Amuah was charged in 1994 with raping a 34-year-old student; later that year, a Connecticut judge allowed him to spend Chrismas in South Africa with his family, on the condition that he would return to the U.S. to stand...
A copy of the letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to President George Bush is now available. A copy of it is here. Here is a short summary: President Bush you are a hypocrite. (page 1). You profess to be a Christian, present liberalism as a civilized model, oppose WMDs, and work toward a unified international community, but...
One of the most exciting things about the University of Auckland Faculty of Law, my home in less than a month now, is that a significant percentage of its students and faculty are Maori. So I was very disturbed to come across this article, discussing Philip Morris's recent apology to the Maori for selling "Maori Mix" cigarettes in Israel....
