For those who are interested, Steve Clemons of The Washington Note is actively covering John Bolton's confirmation hearings. If Clemons' first few posts are any indication, things aren't going very well for the nominee, whose disastrous interim stint at the UN seems to be rightfully coming back to haunt him:1. Senator Hagel is now undecided on whether to support...
The NYT recently ran an interesting article discussing how the Bush administration's policy of cutting military aid to countries that refuse to sign Article 98 agreements with the U.S. has undermined the war against terror in Africa: Last year, the United States cut off $13 million for training and equipping troops in Kenya, where operatives of Al Qaeda killed 224...
I followed the recent discussion about proportionality jus in bello with great interest — and reluctantly agree with Professor Anderson that Louise Arbour’s position is inconsistent with Article 51 of Protocol I. It is also worth noting that her position is even less defensible in terms of the Rome Statute, because there are two critical differences between Article...
The U.S. appeared before the UN Human Rights Committee on Monday — its first appearance since 1995 — to report on its implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Notably, Matthew Waxman, Principal Deputy Director for Policy Planning at the State Department reiterated the U.S. view that the ICCPR does not apply extraterritorially and thus...
The Bush administration plans on asking Congress for another $110 billion to finance its Iraq fiasco, which would bring the total spent on Iraq to more than $400 billion. But don't expect it to help Americans get out of Lebanon. What, you think the U.S. is made of money?Lebanon Situation Update - July 15, 2006 July 15, 2006 This information is current...
After two years of pre-trial activity, nearly all of the 1,545 gacaca courts in Rwanda formally began trials on Saturday. Only 118 such courts had previously conducted trials, a kind of "pilot" program for the gacaca system. Gacaca courts were introduced in 1999 as a way of dealing with the hundreds of thousands of Rwandans accused of involvement in the...
According to a little-noticed Office of the Prosecutor press release two weeks ago, the ICTR has held that the occurrence of genocide in Rwanda is a matter of "common knowledge" and will no longer have to be proven at trial: The Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda on 16 June 2006 ruled that the Trial Chambers must take...
Number of Employees in the Ministry of Fisheries: 401 Number of Employees in the Ministry of Defence: 64 ...
When I first interviewed for my present position at the University of Auckland, I was also invited to interview at the University of Western Australia, in Perth. Not having been to the Southern Hemisphere, I did what all good geographically challenged Americans do — I looked at the map and estimated that it would take two or three hours...
As was widely reported in the media, Khamis al-Obeidi, a defense attorney for Saddam and his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim, was murdered two weeks ago. Al-Obeidi is the third defense attorney to be killed during the trial. Human Rights Watch has released a statement regarding the need to protect defense counsel — current and future — appearing before the Iraqi High...
I noted last week that the special prosecutor investigating past government abuses in Mexico, Ignacio Carrillo Prieto, had finally succeeding in indicting former president Luis Echeverria on genocide charges. His success was short-lived: a judge dismissed the charges yesterday on the ground that they violated Mexico's statute of limitations for genocide. This latest setback for the special prosecutor is...
Two weeks ago, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, briefed the Security Council on the results of his investigation into the situation in Darfur. Not suprisingly, he found the widespread commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity: The Office has so far documented (from public and non-public sources) thousands of alleged direct killings of...
