Opinio Juris is pleased to publish the first in an ongoing series of blog interviews with preeminent practioners, scholars and jurists in international law. We are honored that our first interview is with Justice Richard Goldstone. Justice Goldstone's stepped down last year as a Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, on which served from its establishment in 1994...
Professor Eugene Kontorovich has kindly sent along the following comments to my earlier post:I was happy to read the thoughtful discussion here of my Green Bag article. In that article, I took issue with proponents of using foreign law in constitutional interpretation who quote as originalist support for their position the Declaration of Independence’s reference to a “decent respect for...
Prompted by Roger's post (and also by some edits to a comment about Justice Blackmun's "internationalism" that I have been working on), I took a look at Eugene Kontorovich's essay in Green Bag about misplaced reliance by jurisprudential internationalists on the phrase "Opinions of Mankind." (I am not sure the phrase has become "a staple of the internationalist argument" as...
Suzanne Nossel over at Democracy Arsenal has posted this excellent analysis about why the US House of Representatives' current move (voted out of the International Relations Committee Wednesday) to condition or withhold US dues to the UN will be counter-productive. It includes a lot of detail about the US dues crisis of the late 1990s and how then-US Ambassador to...
I am back on the blog after some out-of-town travel and have been reading with great interest Roger Alford's dispatches from India. Welcome, Roger! I've also been catching up with developments this past week. On June 6, the ICC Chief Prosecutor announced that the ICC would officially open an investigation into the situation in Darfur. This comes after the Security...
Amnesty International issued its 2005 Human Rights Report today, blasting the US on Guantanamo, rendition practices and the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The full report covers human rights practices around the world (or at least of 149 countries), and is generally respected as one of the best-sourced human rights reports available. And, unlike the annual State Department Report, it offers...
Ken Anderson has two posts on the ICRC today: this one addressing the criticism of ICRC in today's WSJ and this one on the ICRC CIHL study, which I mentioned in an earlier post. On the WSJ editorial, I think it -- like the Rifkin and Casey article in National Interest last month -- goes a bit too far by...
"Red crystal" may not roll of the tongue as easily as "red cross" or "red crescent," but there is a movement afoot to replace the current emblems of ICRC and the International Federation of Red Cross/Red Crescent Societies with a non-religious and less politically charged symbol. (See this picture here for the red diamond/crystal design.) ICRC Legal Director Francois...
General Andrew J. Goodpaster died this week at the age of 90. In the months following my graduation from college, but prior to my joining the Foreign Service, I had the great privilege to work briefly under his leadership at the Atlantic Council of the United States -- a non-partisan think tank dedicated to support of the Transatlantic relationship. He...
The NY Times ran this piece this morning on the challenge of coming up with estimates of the total dead as a result of the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. The problem is common in the face of mass humanitarian disasters: how to estimate death tolls in a place with no birth or death certificates or accurate census...
What is it election monitors do, anyway? Slate has this useful primer. But it doesn't explain how last Sunday's elections in Ethiopia could, as the US has concluded, be "marked with irregularities" but at the same time not amount to election "fraud."...
In a vote that appears to have surprised even themselves, the Kuwaiti Parliament yesterday approved a bill to grant women the vote and the right to stand for office. Women will be eligible to be candidates in the 2007 parliamentary elections. Admittedly, the range of issues subject to democratic review in Kuwait remains narrow and tightly controlled by...
