I can understand Roger's desire to defend his former colleague, Colleen Graffy, whose ill-considered comments compounded the diplomatic problem facing the U.S. following the suicide of two Saudis and one Yemeni at Guantanamo last weekend. But there is little there to defend. Certainly the administration did not think so. The State Department distanced itself from Graffy's remarks with...
Jess Bavin has another informative piece on the ICC in today's WSJ, noting the warming trend of the US toward the ICC: That new approach will be on display today, when the ICC's chief prosecutor reports to the United Nations Security Council on his investigation into alleged war crimes in Darfur. The U.S., which now considers the ICC perhaps the...
The writers at Democracy Arsenal did some live-blogging at Tuesday's conference "Power and Superpower: Global Leadership for the 21st Century," an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Institute. While the msm focuses on Mark Malloch Brown's criticisms of US participation at the UN (fueled by "unchecked UN-bashing" in the US), and US Ambassador John...
As the rest of the media is focused on the very good news about the demise of Abu Masub al-Zarqawi (see Andrew Sullivan's round-up of perspectives here, here and here), I wanted to draw attention to an article in today's WSJ describing the ICC's problems with its prosecution of Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army. As Jess Bravin's...
One of the advantages of teaching at the University of Missouri is having access to one of the world's great journalism schools. Several of our law students earn joint degrees (JD/MA, LLM/PhD) in law and journalism, and I have had the opportunity to bring experienced international journalists into my classroom to talk about reporting on humanitarian crises. I...
Certain events seem to lose impact with time, or are simply not known to younger generations. The massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam war may be one of them. For those of us too young to remember the incident and the subesquent military trial of Lt. William Calley — the officer held repsonsible for the massacre —...
The European Court of Justice today ruled against the European Council and European Commission in a case brought by members of the European Parliament challenging the Council agreement to share airline data with the United States. The Commission had earlier issued a decision declaring the agreement on data-sharing complied with EU retstrictions on dissemination of private data; this decision...
Human Rights First is providing blog coverage of the court martial of Sgt. Santos Cardona, a former Abu Ghraib guard and dog handler accused of abusive treatment of detainees. This trial looks to be significant given the defense theory that the abuses that occured at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq "migrated" from Guantanamo, where practices like "waterboarding"...
According to this report, a group of former Israeli diplomats and parliamentarians believe that Iranian President Ahmedinijad's recent remarks calling for the destruction of Israel and his description of the Holocaust as myth constitute conspiracy to commit genocide and incitement of genocide. They want to sue Ahmedinijad. The potential suit raises some interesting questions of jurisdiction....
A recent poll published by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland shows strong support for international adjudication of U.S. compliance with its treaty obligations. Among the other findings are strong support for changing the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo to conform with requests by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, support for the ICC...
On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris, I am pleased to annouce that the first annual Opinio Juris on-line symposium, "Challenges to Public International Law," will be held this fall. The details below will be posted on our sidebar for future reference. Opinio Juris Online Symposium 2006: Challenges to Public International Law Theme Statement As...
Andrew Sullivan notes here the release of the Kings College London annual report on rates of imprisonment around the world. Here is the link. Sullivan summarizes: The rates are given as the number of prison inmates per 100,000 people in the population at large. It's pretty staggering that by far the highest rates of imprisonment occur in the U.S....
