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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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! ...
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...
So reports ABC News (and multiple other news outlets): The man who ran Libya's extensive spy network and was considered one of the closest confidants of ex-leader Moammar Gadhafi was indicted in Mauritania on Monday and transferred to a public jail, according to a justice official. Abdullah al-Senoussi, Libya's former head of intelligence, is wanted by the International Criminal Court, as well...
That's my basic reaction to the release of the full judgment in the Taylor trial, which checks in at an utterly absurd 2,499 pages. (The judgment is downloadable, assuming you have a very fancy computer, here.) 2,499 pages is clearly a new record for a judgment of an international tribunal, especially in a case with one defendant. By way of...
Earlier today, Russia called on the ICC to investigate possible war crimes committed by NATO forces during its bombing campaign in Libya: The International Criminal Court should look into all cases of NATO airstrikes in Libya that resulted in civilian deaths, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "We welcome the decision of ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to consider alleged violations of international humanitarian...
As readers know, Dapo Akande, Jens Ohlin, and I have been having a friendly debate over whether Article 95 of the Rome Statute requires Libya to surrender Saif to the ICC pending the Pre-Trial Chamber's resolution of its admissibility challenge. (See here and here.) Two organs of the Court have now weighed in on the issue, with a rather ironic...
