I want to take a moment to spruik (if you don't know the word, look it up!) Jeffrey Kahn's new book, Mrs. Shipley's Ghost: The Right to Travel and Terrorist Watchlists, which has just been published by the University of Michigan Press. Here is the publisher's description: Today, when a single person can turn an airplane into a guided missile, no...
I have now had the opportunity to read both Judge van den Wyngaert's request to be excused from the Kenyatta case and the Presidency's decision to grant that request. There is no question that workload did indeed play a role in the Judge's decision to withdraw. But it also seems clear that there was at least one other reason, as...
From the Court's press release: Today, 26 April 2013, Leiden University won the final round of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Trial Competition, English version, held in ICC Courtroom I in The Hague (Netherlands). Osgoode Hall Law School of York University (Canada) and Bond University (Australia) won, respectively, second and third place. The Best Speaker award went to Katherine Stewart of...
I cannot find the relevant document on the ICC website, but Kenya's CapitalFM is reporting that Judge Christine van den Wyngaert, sitting in the Trial Chamber, has withdrawn from the case against Uhuru Kenyatta because of concerns about the prosecution's behavior: In her opinion the prosecution failed to disclose to the Pre-Trial Chamber on the credibility of witness four and disclosing new...
Two years ago, I wrote a long post analyzing the most serious charge in Bradley Manning's court martial -- aiding the enemy, a violation of Art. 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and 10 USC 904. I claimed in the post that someone like Bill Keller, the Executive Editor of the New York Times during the WikiLeaks era,...
In the wake of Obama's memorable statement, a number of bloggers have questioned whether the Boston bombings deserve to be labeled "terrorism." Most of those bloggers -- such as the excellent Ali Abuminah here -- emphasize that many US definitions of terrorism require the violent act in question to be politically or ideologically motivated, which is still an open question with regard...
The Pre-Trial Chamber has granted the OPCD's request to withdraw from the case and has appointed the OPCD's chosen replacement, John RWD Jones QC, to represent Saif until such time as he is either able to choose his own lawyer or the ICC finally rules on Libya's admissibility challenge. Jones is a fantastic choice -- he successfully represented both Oric...
So reports the Kuwait News Agency. The building is expected to be completed in late 2015. Here is the winning design: You can read more about the design, and see more artists renderings, here. It's not a bad design, but it's a bit too high-modernist for my taste. I preferred the one by Wiel Arets Architects & Associates that won third prize...
An opinion piece in Al-Jazeera by an international lawyer who works with the Palestinians, John Whitbeck, reports some interesting comments by Fatou Bensouda about Palestinian ratification: During a public discussion held at the Academie Diplomatique Internationale in Paris on March 20, Fatou Bensouda, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, addressed the potential membership of Palestine in the ICC. During the...
[Kevin Jon Heller is currently Associate Professor & Reader at Melbourne Law School.]
This post is part of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics Vol. 45, No. 1 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below.
I appreciate the opportunity to respond to Jenia’s excellent article. I always learn from her scholarship, and this article is no exception. That said, I find myself in an unusual quandary. When asked to critique an article, I normally take issue with its substance. There is very little substance in Jenia’s article, however, with which I disagree. Indeed, if she and I were both ICC judges, I imagine that we would almost always agree on the appropriate remedy or sanction for a violation of a defendant’s rights. That said, I find the rhetoric of Jenia’s article very problematic. To begin with, I think her distinction between “absolutist” and “balancing” approaches to remedies misleads more than it enlightens. Like my friend Meg DeGuzman, I don’t believe that the ICC has ever engaged in the “absolutist” approach, selecting remedies for misconduct without reference to the consequences for victims, the penological rationales of international criminal law (ICL), etc. When the Court has selected a drastic remedy for a violation of the defendant’s rights, it has done so only when the violation seriously compromised the Court’s ability to accurately determine the defendant’s guilt or innocence. The Trial Chamber initially stayed the proceedings in Lubanga, for example, only when it lost faith in the OTP’s ability to identify (much less disclose) exculpatory evidence. In Jenia’s own words (p. 188), “[w]ithout examining the documents at issue, the Chamber would be unable to ensure that the verdict in the case was fair and accurate.” The Appeals Chamber, in turn, only lifted the stay once it became clear that the OTP would, in fact, disclose any and all exculpatory evidence to the defendant.Since I was unable to attend their book launch at Georgetown yesterday, the least I can do is put in a hearty plug for a new casebook written by a number of superb IHL scholars: Geoff Corn, Victor Hansen, Chris Jenks, Richard Jackson, Eric Jensen, and James Schoettler. It's entitled The Law of Armed Conflict: An Operational Approach, and it...
Omar al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, visited Chad earlier this year. The Chadian government made no attempt to arrest him, despite the fact that -- as a member of the ICC -- both SC Res. 1593 (the Darfur referral) and the Rome Statute obligated it to cooperate with the Court's arrest warrant. Human rights groups criticized Chad's unwillingness to arrest...
