In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Is There a Federal Policy Preventing States from Recognizing the Armenian Genocide?

15 Dec

That's the question that a Ninth Circuit en banc panel heard yesterday in Movesian v. Versicherung AG. There is no statute, treaty or executive order refusing to recognize the Armenian Genocide, but there have been equivocal statements by various Presidents on the subject and failed attempts to adopt congressional resolutions recognizing the Armenian genocide. Is that enough to...

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09 Dec

[Shana Tabak is a Visiting Associate Professor of Clinical Law at The George Washington University Law School, where she is also a Friedman Fellow with the International Human Rights Clinic.] Although the field of transitional justice has made great strides in addressing harms perpetrated against women in the aftermath of conflict, this paper argues that transitional justice mechanisms mistakenly rely on...

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07 Dec

Yes, at least according to this account by Douglas Gillis in Foreign Policy, the ECCC has been nearly a complete and utter failure (and a waste of money).  The main problem seems to be, according to the article, incompetent international judges (or at least one shady German judge). Obviously, the U.N. Secretariat, which was managing this tribunal, seems to have...

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07 Dec

Gideon Boas makes a number of valuable points in his comments on my article, not least of which is the fact that the evidentiary challenges I highlighted with respect to the Lubanga trial are not new.  I particularly appreciate the experiences he recounts from his time at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (‘ICTY’), which, like its sister tribunal...

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07 Dec

[Gideon Boas is an Associate Professor in the Monash Law School and a former Senior Legal Officer at the ICTY.] This article deals carefully with the Lubanga proceedings before the ICC, and in particular the difficulty caused by the Prosecution collecting information through the extensive use of confidentiality agreements under Article 54(3)(e) of the Rome Statute.  One of the great difficulties...

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07 Dec

[Christian De Vos is a PhD researcher at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies. The author may be contacted at c.m.devos [at] cdh.leidenuniv.nl] Having recently embarked on a multi-year project that seeks to interrogate the possibilities for ‘local ownership’ in the context of the International Criminal Court (ICC), my article approaches the concept through the lens of locally-based informants and so-called...

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07 Dec

That's the question asked by my friends at Wronging Rights, in response to a recent article in Time: TIME claims to have obtained an internal ICC memo showing that the Court is "compiling evidence of possible recent war crimes in southern Sudan, allegedly directed by Sudanese Defense Minister Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein." Apparently, in addition to the Prosecutor's request...

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06 Dec

These are not the best of days for Greece, and even relatively small matters, like their ongoing dispute with Macedonia over the name "Macedonia" is going against them. Greece was wrong to block Macedonia's bid to join Nato in 2008 because of a row over its name, the International Court of Justice has ruled. It said Athens should have abided by a...

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06 Dec

Another year, another climate COP.  This year's conference of the parties (COP)  is in Durban, South Africa.  The South Africans have provided a wonderful venue and the meeting has proceeded thus far with few of the histrionics of Copenhagen and Cancun.  But a certain weariness has crept into the proceedings, as massive numbers of people gather year after year, with...

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