Julian's latest snide swipe at the ICC focuses on Bashir's visit to Kenya, which he describes as a "slap in the face to the ICC Prosecutor and the defenders of the Bashir arrest warrant." Not surprisingly, Julian conveniently fails to mention the details of Bashir's visit: Sudanese President Omar al Bashir curiously flew in through Nairobi’s Wilson Airport, and ...
So says a draft UN report that studied events in the Congo between 1993 and 2008: An exhaustive U.N. investigation into the history of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo has concluded that the Rwandan military and its allies carried out hundreds of large-scale killings of ethnic Hutu refugees during the 1990s that amounted to war crimes,...
It's not often that you run into a story that combines international arbitration, Kremlin politics, post-Soviet autocrats, utopian urban projects, transnational networks, electoral politics, and chess. So, read on...
The report is here. I have neither the time nor the stomach to fully engage with it, but I couldn't let paragraph 82 pass without comment: 82. The United States is currently at war with Al Qaeda and its associated forces. President Obama has made clear that the United States is fully committed to complying with the Constitution and with all...
So reports Reuters: The Dutch prosecutor's office said on Friday it would look into whether Dutch peacekeeping soldiers should face criminal charges over the 1995 massacre in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. About 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed at Srebrenica after Bosnian Serb forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave where Dutch troops were ...
I wanted to flag for interested readers an upcoming event at the British Institute of International & Comparative Law (BIICL). On September 10, BIICL will host its Fifteenth Investment Treaty Forum, with a focus on recent developments in international arbitration procedure. Topics will include disclosure of evidence, state privilege, transparency of hearings, and whether or not investment arbitration is (or should be) different from...
Last month the Second Circuit issued a remarkable ruling that threatens to upend the longstanding rule of successor state liability for the credit obligations of predecessor states. It did so by ruling that the automatic assumption of liability of sovereign debt of the predecessor state under international law is not a “commercial activity” within the meaning of the FSIA....
In the interests of being fair and balanced (as always!), I thought I would post on this good response by David Bosco to Jeremy Rabkin's recent essay on the International Criminal Court in The Weekly Standard (which I discussed here). Although I am not totally convinced by it, I think Bosco offers the best possible defense of the ICC that would...
I have been negligent in failing to post on two excellent assessments of the recent ICC Review Conference in Kampala and its ultimate decision on aggression. Both assessments (one by Heritage's Brett Schaefer and the other by George Mason's Jeremy Rabkin) give the Obama Administration some credit for limiting the damage to U.S. interests at Kampala. But both ultimately conclude...
Dave has kindly sent another post on piracy. Here it is. Kevin graciously offered me the chance to respond to his contrasting reading of the logic of Judge Jackson’s decision dismissing the piracy charge. But since we both reach the same ultimate conclusion—that the correct legal definition of piracy should be that contained in the 1958 High Seas Treaty/1982 UN Convention...
I have to respectfully disagree with Dave's interpretation of Judge Jackson's decision. The decision is almost certainly incorrect from the standpoint of the law of nations; as Dave rightly points out, the definition of piracy in the High Seas Convention and in UNCLOS likely represents the customary standard. But I think Judge Jackson's decision makes complete sense given the US's...
[We are pleased to have David Glazier, a professor of law at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, share his thoughts on the U.S. District Court's recent interpretation of the piracy statute in U.S. v. Said] As I read Judge Jackson’s decision, the crux of his holding boils down to the following syllogism: (1) Federal criminal statutes must be interpreted according to the...
