Douglas Burgess, Jr., has an editorial in today's New York Times arguing that piracy should be considered terrorism in order to facilitate its prosecution. It's an interesting piece, but I have to take issue with the basic premise of his argument: Are pirates a species of terrorist? In short, yes. The same definition of pirates as hostis humani generis could also...
Not according to Stephen Zunes, a Middle East expert at the University of San Francisco. He recently posted an essay on Alternet that should give progressive international lawyers and scholars pause. Here is the introduction: For those hoping for a dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy under an Obama administration -- particularly regarding human rights, international law, and respect for international...
An association of 15 human-rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the Save Darfur Coalition, released a devastating report today on the Sudanese government's cynical -- and mendacious -- PR campaign to convince the international community that it is committed to bringing peace to Darfur. Here is a snippet of the executive summary: This report focuses on four...
The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has a must-read article today about how ordinary Darfuris view the OTP's decision to seek arrest warrants for the rebel leaders allegedly responsible for killing 12 peacekeepers in 2007. According to the article -- and all the usual caveats about anecdotal evidence apply -- the response is uniformly negative: Yasir, an IDP (internally displaced...
Violence in Kenya following the disputed 2007 elections left more than 1,300 people dead and more than 500,000 internally displaced. Last month, Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence released a 527-page report -- the Waki Report -- that concluded much of the violence was planned and organized by members of Kenya's security agencies, business leaders, politicians, and government officials. ...
I will be spending most of the next two months in Europe, with the following itinerary: Vienna, December 7-17 Leuven, December 17-20 Vienna, December 20-26 Rome, December 26-January 1 Amsterdam/The Hague, January 1-February 1 If any OJ readers in those cities -- students, academics, activists, etc. -- would like to meet for coffee or a drink, please don't hesitate to contact me: k.heller@auckland.ac.nz....
In the Wall Street Journal editorial Ken mentions below, Goldsmith and Posner argue -- in defense of their thesis that Europeans ignore international law if it is not in their interest to obey it -- that "when nations led by Europe created the International Criminal Court (ICC), they purported to limit the Security Council's power to delay or halt ICC...
I have posted a new essay on SSRN, a draft chapter of a book that Markus Dubber and I are editing for Stanford University Press entitled "The Handbook of Comparative Criminal Law." In addition to my chapter, which is something of an outlier, the book contains 17 chapters on the substantive criminal law of individual countries. We have attempted to...
The ICC has been holding a competition to determine which architecture firm will build the Court's permanent home. Yesterday, the jury selected three winners. Here they are, from first place to third place: As the article notes, the ICC can award the actual contract to any of the three winners. The final design will be chosen in 2010 and the building...
The University of Auckland magazine recently published a copy of the university's 1918 final exam in public international law. I have only the vaguest recollection of the exam I took, but I it wasn't this hard. (Exhibit A: I didn't fail.) Have academic standards really declined so precipitously? How would you fare, readers?...
The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has an interesting report today on the Ugandan government's efforts to prosecute Kony and other LRA members in a special domestic court. According to the IWPR's report, the problem is not the lack of political will, but the potential retroactivity of the legislation necessary to make the Rome Statute's core crimes -- war...
Anyone who still doubts that the ICC's pursuit of Bashir is unnerving the Sudanese government should take a gander at this article: An interview with published by Sudan official news agency (SUNA) with British Foreign Secretary David Miliband yesterday is fabricated, according to a statement by the British embassy in Khartoum. “The statements that SUNA news agency attributed to the Foreign Secretary...
