French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner calls in the Financial Times for a tax on global financial transactions as a means of funding the currently moribund UN Millennium Development Goals. It is an idea that has been floated repeatedly since the 1990s - sometimes with the emphasis on the tax itself as a means of deliberately slowing down and making more...
The Trial Chamber in Karadzic has instructed the prosecution to reduce the scope of its indictment from monstrous and completely unworkable to somewhat less monstrous and somewhat less completely unworkable. The result? Victims groups burning judges and prosecutors (and my client) in effigy and threatening not to cooperate with the prosecution: Several hundred members of victims' associations have protested in front...
The Crimes of War site has noted that Florence Hartmann has been convicted in the ICTY: The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia this week convicted a former official of contempt of court for disclosing the contents and effect of two confidential Appeals Chamber decisions. The Court found that Florence Hartmann, a French journalist and former spokesperson for the Prosecutor,...
I imagine there will be much gnashing of teeth over the Goldstone Commission's report -- the meme of the day seems to be that because the Commission was on a fact-finding mission, it wasn't permitted to infer from those facts that war crimes or crimes against humanity were committed -- but this attack deserves special mention: Avi Bell, a professor of...
You can find all 574 pages of it here. From the press release: The UN Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone on Tuesday released its long-awaited report on the Gaza conflict, in which it concluded there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed...
Although often critical of Israel, I have always been sympathetic to Israeli claims that the UN Human Rights Council has deliberately appointed individuals to investigate conditions in the Palestinian territories who were either actually biased against Israel or who at least could not avoid the appearance of bias. I was completely opposed, for example, to the HRC's decision to appoint...
1. All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) It is a curious feature of international human rights that we are reluctant to speak about foundations. As Jacques Maritain put it with respect...
My friend Jens Ohlin, who teaches at Cornell, has posted an important new essay on SSRN, "The Torture Lawyers." Here is the abstract of the essay, which is forthcoming in the Harvard International Law Journal: One of the longest shadows cast by the Bush Administration’s War on Terror involves the fate of the torture lawyers who authored or signed memoranda approving...
I don't have any deeper insight into the situation than Ken, but there certainly has been pressure on the Prosecutor to investigate Afghanistan for some time -- both because it's not in Africa and because of US/NATO involvement in the armed conflict there. It is important to stress, though, that the OTP has not formally opened an investigation; it is...
Adam has kindly allowed me to post his response -- which first appeared at Making Sense of Darfur -- to my criticism of his claim that domestic trials or a TRC would likely have been better than the IMT. Here it is, in full: Neither truth commissions nor domestic trials are as black and white as Professor Heller’s critique of my...
At the risk of being told again that I am writing in “literary Klingon,” I want to return to the issue of virtual worlds and their real world implications. This time, a virtual world is being considered as a way to assist in the management of an international organization, namely NATO. According to Danger Room: NATO’s got a new plan for training...
Orin Kerr has an interesting post at Volokh noting a story reporting that NSA intercepts were used in the just announced conviction in the UK of terrorists in the liquid-mixing-chemicals case. Orin is right in saying the story deserves more notice than it will probably get. I found it particularly interesting that apparently a reason why the NSA finally signed...
