In association with the International Commission of Jurists

A New Approach to Counter-Piracy: Lower the Burden of Proof for Prosecuting Pirates

31 Mar

NGO Monitor loves to criticize progressive NGOs for a lack of transparency concerning their funding.  A recent report, for example, predictably attacks Human Rights Watch for not identifying all of its donors, particularly those at last year's fundraising event in Saudi Arabia: HRW publishes the names and amounts provided by some of its donors, but others remain hidden. Although HRW...

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30 Mar

Yesterday's oral argument in Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd gave strong indications that the Court was prepared to extend the territorial limitations of Hoffman-La Rouche v. Empagran to the securities fraud context. Morrison involves a class action brought by foreign plaintiffs against a foreign stock issuer on a foreign exchange for alleged fraud that occurred on foreign soil....

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30 Mar

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...

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30 Mar

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...

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29 Mar

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...

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29 Mar

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...

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29 Mar

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...

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27 Mar

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....

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26 Mar

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...

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25 Mar

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...

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