AP reports that a Dutch court of appeals has affirmed a lower court ruling that held the UN could not be sued for its failure to protect Bosnian civilians in Srebrenica: Appeals judges have ruled that relatives of victims of Europe's worst massacre since World War II cannot sue the United Nations for compensation in a Dutch court. Lawyers for...
Sudan is preparing for a national election next month. It may not be the solution for Sudan, given that it is still very doubtful that there is enough cohesiveness for a genuine democratic result. Still, I wonder if the ICC's Prosecutor may be going a little far here. A day after Sudan president Omar al-Bashir threatened to cut the fingers off...
A quick note for interested readers -- the Texas Law Review has just published my latest article, Unpacking the Compact Clause. They've posted a copy of it here as well. My own abstract of the piece follows. The Compact Clause prohibits U.S. states from making “any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power” absent congressional consent. No one, however, has ever...
Fascinating inside baseball piece on the Obama Administration's internal debate over war on terrorism policy. It features a struggle between the State Department (Harold Koh) and the Defense Department (Jeh Johnson) with the OLC (David Barron) playing referee. The rift has been most pronounced between top lawyers in the State Department and the Pentagon, though it has also involved conflicts among career...
David Bernstein links today to an article in The Times -- a right-wing British newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch -- attacking Human Rights Watch. The article is breathlessly entitled "Nazi Scandal Engulfs Human Rights Watch," which I have to admit piqued my curiousity -- until I realized that the "Nazi scandal" concerned Marc Gelasco, a research analyst who resigned from...
The full text of U.S. State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh's speech at ASIL can be found here. Ken has already praised it, Kevin (along with Marko Milanovic) have rejected it, and others are staying neutral or reserving judgment. Here is what I took away from the speech: The Obama Administration has now embraced the Bush Administration's position that the U.S....
I've long thought that any scholar who wants to maintain his or her credibility should stay far away from the US government, no matter which party is in power. Harold Koh is a case in point. Others have highlighted his problematic testimony about targeted killing, which continued to maintain the Bush administration's fictions --...
Every time that I teach international criminal law, at least one student writes on whether you could prosecute the Burmese junta for crimes against humanity. As a matter of substantive ICL, the answer is clearly yes. The problem is jurisdictional -- who is going to prosecute them? Apparently, the UK thinks it should be the ICC via a Security Council...
I love Glenn Greenwald. He catches Obama in a remarkable -- and shameless -- act of hypocrisy. Obama on why America can't investigate the systematic human-rights abuses that were ordered at the highest levels of its government: I'm a strong believer that it's important to look forward and not backwards. And Obama on why Indonesia must investigate the systematic human-rights abuses...
The Eleventh Circuit in United States v. Frank has ruled that a child sex trafficking statute applies extraterritorially. The statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2251A, provides that: “[w]hoever purchases ...
In case you haven't seen it, make sure to check out Jane Mayer's demolition of Marc Thiessen's book-length apologia for torture, "Courting Disaster." As her review demonstrates, it's much easier to defend torture when you distort nearly everything. UPDATE: This, I think, is the money quote: The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not...
