In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Kevin Jon Heller

10 Jun

Like most people who believe in international criminal justice, I'm frustrated by the Sudanese government's ability to stonewall the ICC regarding its innumerable crimes in Darfur.  But reactions like these don't help: Moreno-Ocampo, who stands down as ICC chief prosecutor in two weeks, called on the Security Council to take tougher action to detain President Omar al-Bashir and other Sudanese officials...

|
07 Jun

The Office of the Prosecutor has filed its response to Libya's challenge to the admissibility of the cases against Saif Gaddafi and Abdullah al-Senussi.  There are a number of interesting aspects to the response.  First, it says nothing about the case of al-Senussi.  That's a curious omission, given that the response specifically points out with regard to Saif (para. 41)...

|
06 Jun

I want to call readers' attention to a wonderful new Oxford book to which I've contributed a chapter: International Prosecutors, edited by Luc Reydams, Jan Wouters, and Cedric Ryngaert.  Here is the publisher's description: This volume examines the prosecution as an institution and a function in a dozen international and hybrid criminal tribunals, from Nuremberg to the International Criminal Court. It...

|
03 Jun

I want to congratulate my friend Andrew Cayley, the Chief International Co-Prosecutor of the ECCC and a barrister at London's Doughty Street Chambers, on being named QC in England.  Given the constant turmoil that has roiled the ECCC over the past year, the news is a welcome (re-)affirmation of Andrew's legal ability.  The ECCC is lucky to have him....

|
02 Jun

The Pre-Trial Chamber has held that Article 95 of the Rome Statute applies to requests for surrender, thereby agreeing with Dapo and Jens and disagreeing with me. It's a poorly reasoned decision, giving a completely counterintuitive reading to the "such evidence" language in the article (pretending that the clause in question doesn't actually contain the word "such") and ignoring all...

|
30 May

So reports The Guardian: Liberia's former president, Charles Taylor, has been sentenced to 50 years in jail for being "in a class of his own" when committing war crimes during the long-running civil war in neighbouring Sierra Leone. Judges at a UN-backed tribunal in The Hague said his leadership role and exploitation of the conflict to extract so-called "blood diamonds" meant he...

|
30 May

Given my basic cynicism toward just about everything, I'm difficult to shock. But I was certainly shocked to learn that Yale University is allowing Gen. Stanley McChrystal to teach a course that enrolled students have to agree in writing not to discuss. Here is Gian Gentile, a professor at West Point, criticizing the course in The Atlantic: Enter retired...

|
30 May

I originally thought it was a story in The Onion, but once again truth is stranger than fiction: Top international prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, best known for pursuing war criminals, has been nominated as chief investigator at FIFA, soccer's scandal-plagued governing body, with a brief to probe match-fixing and corruption. FIFA's executive committee is due to discuss the appointment of a chief investigator...

|
27 May

I've been meaning to blog about the 33-year sentence that Pakistan recently imposed on Shakil Afridi, the doctor who secretly worked with the CIA to locate bin Laden. The United States is predictably up in arms over the sentence, with Leon Panetta recently claiming that "[i]t is so difficult to understand and it’s so disturbing that they would sentence...

|
22 May

Evelyne Schmid, a lecturer in law at Bangor University in Wales, has taken it upon herself to convert the 2,499 page non-searchable PDF into a searchable (but, alas, still 2,499 pages) text file. She has made the file available here. We all owe her our thanks! ...

|
22 May

Readers will recall that I followed the progress of my book on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals on the blog, from proposal to finished project.  I received a great deal of positive feedback on those posts, as well as some very useful feedback on the project itself.  (Also a couple of complaints that I was just being narcissistic, but you can't...

|