A fascinating and extremely important trial began yesterday at the Hague. The defendant, Gus Kouwenhoven, is charged with committing various war crimes against Liberians and violating a UN arms embargo. Kouwenhoven, who is Dutch, was the general manager of the Oriental Timber Company, Liberia's largest timber company while Charles Taylor was in power. While in that...
From the Daily Telegraph: POLISH authorities have withdrawn permission for the musical Jesus Christ Superstar to be performed at Majdanek, the former Nazi concentration camp, after protests by Jewish groups. The Culture Ministry and the camp's management today said the performance by a local Polish theatre group could not go ahead. "The play was to break down barriers between people, but it turns...
Here's what's been happening in the world of the ICC: The UN Mission in the Congo, the ICC, and the governments of Germany and the DRC are working to transfer Ignace Murwanashyaka — the FDLR leader whose situation I discussed last week — to the ICC to stand trial. Their efforts are bound to further antagonize the Rwandan government, which...
US/EU efforts to convince the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority to recognize Israel and disavow suicide bombings are not going very well. Russia has already pledged $10 million to the financially-strapped PA government; Iran has pledged $50 million, and Qatar has pledged $50 million. And now Saudi Arabia has pledged an additional $92 million. I don't know whether using financial assistance...
Exciting — and long overdue — news: Germany has agreed to open its Holocaust archives in Bad Arolsen to historians and the public. The archives, which have long been used by the International Red Cross to trace missing and dead Jews, contain between 30 and 50 million documents. I hope Roger will offer us his thoughts on this...
An appeals court in the Central African Republic has referred Ange Felix Patasse, the country's former president, and Jean-Pierre Bamba, the Democratic Republic of Congo's current vice-president, to the ICC. Security forces controlled by Patasse and backed by soldiers from Bemba's then-rebel army are accused of executing and raping civilians after they staved off an attempted coup in 2002....
The ICTY has held that Vladimir "Rambo" Kovacevic, a former office in the Yugoslav army, is mentally unfit to stand trial. According to the Tribunal, "[t]he accused does not have the capacity to plead, to understand the nature of the charges, to understand the course of proceedings, to understand the details of the evidence...
The United Nations Security Council has unanimously passed Resolution 1664, which calls for Kofi Annan to begin negotiating with the Lebanese government to establish an international tribunal that would try the individuals responsible for the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others in May, 2005. Annan has suggested to the Security Council that the tribunal...
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were 762 active hate groups in the US as of 2004, ranging from neo-Nazis to the KKK to black separatists. To date, however, the Department of Homeland Security has not issued a single Homeland Security Assessment warning us about one of those groups. It has, however, just issued the following...
I want to recommend a wonderful book written by a dear friend and occasional collaborator, Brandt Goldstein. As the title indicates, it's the remarkable — and true — story of how a group of students at Yale Law School and Harold Koh shut down Guantanamo Bay in the early 1990s, when it was being used to illegally detain a group...
I don't know how I missed this, but in late March prosecutors from Poland's National Remembrance Institute, a government organization that investigates communist-era crimes, filed charges against General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's final communist leader, for unconstitutionally imposing martial law in 1981. The move, which was designed to eliminate the Solidarity movement, led to the imprisonment of tens of...
The Rwandan government has appointed a commission to investigate France's role in the country's 1994 genocide. The commission, which is slated to begin work on April 16th, includes Jean de Dieu Mucyo, Rwanda's Prosecutor General and a genocide survior, as well as Brigadier General Jerome Ngendahimana, a senior officer in the Rwanda Armed Forces (FAR) during the genocide. The...
