That's the headline of today's New York Times article about Ali Kushayb, the janjaweed militia leader who has been indicted by the ICC. According to the article, the "[t]he move is widely being interpreted as a way for Sudan to improve its image abroad and attempt to head off the possible genocide prosecution of the country’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir." Honestly,...
The Virginia Journal of International Law is delighted to continue its partnership with Opinio Juris this week in this online symposium featuring three articles recently published by VJIL in Vol. 49:1, available here. On Tuesday, James Hathaway, Dean of the Melbourne Law School, will discuss his article, The Human Rights Quagmire of “Human Trafficking”. Dean Hathaway’s article takes...
Ladies and gentlemen, your peacemaker: Al-Bashir who rarely gives interviews told the British Channel 4 News from Khartoum that rape claims are made up by Darfuri women. “The women inside the camps are under the influence of the rebels and some are even relatives of the rebels. That’s why they make these claims” Al-Bashir said. “We are fully convinced that no rape took...
The Christian Science Monitor ran an important story on Darfur a few days ago, detailing how Bashir is using the claim that his indictment will derail the peace process as a smokescreen for continuing to wage war against the Darfurians. The title says it all -- "Sudan Makes Case Abroad While Still Bombing Darfur": "How will the ICC hamper the peace...
Serbia might want the ICJ to opine on the legality of Kosovo's independence, but it seems that the horse is already out of the barn. Even Macedonia and Montenegro have now recognized Kosovo, the latter particularly irking the Serbian government: Montenegro's announcement sparked outrage in Belgrade, which along with key ally Russia has been vehemently opposing the split. Serbia in a...
I don't even know where to begin with this one. I'll let the BBC tell the story: Comic actor Bolek Polivka is suing former business partner Tomas Harabis over the rights to the fictitious Wallachian Kingdom. The [Czech] court must decide whether Mr Polivka is the true "king" of the fairy-tale realm...
Following up on Peter’s earlier post on the foreign policy views of Sarah Palin, I note this letter that she wrote in September 2007 to Senators Stevens and Murkowski expressing her “strong support” for the ratification of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). She also seems to advocate the use of the International Tribunal for the...
What is it with international prosecutors and their duty to disclose exculpatory evidence? First the ICC stays the Lubanga trial because of the Prosecutor's abuse of Article 54. And now the ICTR has had to formally reprimand its Prosecutor, Hassan Jallow, for failing to disclose exculpatory evidence in the high-profile Military II trial: In their ruling dated September 22, 2008, the...
I have spent a fair bit of time the past couple days reviewing the Supreme Court's docket for the upcoming term with an eye for any cases that might be of particular interest to our readers. Here is my list of the most important cases that are germane to our discipline. The big issues are (1) senior government...
So the financial crisis has definitively moved from being a Wall Street phenomenon featuring a certain amount of European schadenfreude to a global crisis in which European banks are just as involved as American ones. That it is a global crisis and not merely an American one means two things. First, early on in this financial mess, the sense that...
The Daily Monitor Online, the web presence of one of Uganda's leading independent newspapers, has an interesting article today suggesting that the newly-enacted Child Soldiers Accountabilty Act could be used against senior officials in the Ugandan People's Defence Force (UPDF) -- the armed forces of Uganda -- if they traveled to the US: While no senior officer in the UPDF has...
Professor Charli Carpenter (of UMass Amherst Political Science Department) and I had a lovely conversation over the weekend about battlefield robots. Well, actually it was an interview for a project of hers, so she let me do pretty much all the talking. She has now posted some thoughts of her own, in highly interesting, highly recommended (for that small chunk...
