I am delighted to announce that my colleague Carolyn Evans has been appointed Dean of the Melbourne Law School -- the first female Dean in the law school's history. Carolyn is one of the world's leading law and religion scholars, as her biography attests: Carolyn has degrees in Arts and Law from Melbourne University and a doctorate from Oxford University...
I am heading to Europe on Wednesday for a couple of weeks. I will be in Salzburg from November 13-19, participating in an amazing project on the intersection of international and Islamic law that is sponsored by the International Bar Association and the Salzburg Global Seminar. (The definition of terror: my chapter for the resulting book, on sentencing and rights...
A couple of weeks ago, New Stream Dream accused me of never believing individuals who -- like Khadr and Lynne Stewart -- confess to committing crimes. Well, I believe this confession: In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about...
The following is a guest post by David Glazier, an Associate Professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. As Opinio Juris readers likely recall, there are two ongoing federal prosecutions in Norfolk, Virginia before different judges of Somali pirates who made the boneheaded mistakes of attempting attacks on two separate U.S. Navy warships. (Hey, it was dark!) In the first...
At least the war criminal lost: The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons. Pantano ordered the two men to search the car...
I have bumped Dave's comment to the main page, because it's worth a read -- and not just because it supports my claim that Khadr will serve no more than two years in a Canadian prison...
This according to AP: The sentence was handed down Sunday under a plea bargain in which the young Canadian admitted to five war crimes charges, including killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Under the deal, the judge was limited to the eight-year sentence and had to ignore the recommendation of a military jury that Khadr serve 40...
Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing. Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...
I wanted to let readers know that I am no longer associated with the Karadzic defense team, either formally or informally. Being involved in the case was a remarkable experience, one that I will always value. I wish the defense team well -- and more importantly, I wish Dr. Karadzic a fair trial....
Omar Khadr accepted a plea deal yesterday that called for him to plead guilty to all of the charges against him in exchange for serving one more year at Gitmo and then being repatriated to Canada to serve another seven years in prison. Predictably, the government is claiming that the guilty plea is proof that Khadr is factually guilty; as...
AFP ran an interesting story yesterday about how Palestinians are using their tunnels to smuggle goods into Egypt, in defiance of Israel's ongoing ban on exports from Gaza: But the canvas sacks full of food, beauty products and second-hand clothes that used to be dragged through hundreds of tunnels beneath the border now flow the other way in a...
On Thursday night I had the privilege of participating in a live webinar on targeted killing and Al-Aulaqi held by the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research. The other participants included Yale's Andrew March, Emory's Laurie Blank, and Seton Hall's Jonathan Hafetz. It was a wonderful, wide-ranging discussion, one that focused not only on the international-law aspects of...
