Dominic Ongwen is one of the five leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) who have been indicted by the ICC. Like the others, Ongwen is charged with numerous crimes against humanity, including the forcible recruitment of children "as fighters, porters and sex slaves to serve the LRA." The indictment makes a strong case that Ongwen is guilty of the...
I spent my last weekend in Sweden camping and hiking on the island of Tjörn on the west coast of Sweden, just north of Gothenburg. When I came to the idyllic sailing village of Skärhamn, I knew this was where I would spend the night. So 300 meters from the Nordic Watercolour Museum, I found an ocean-view spot...
They are:Sydney Opera House, Australia Old town of Corfu, Greece Red Fort Complex, India Bordeaux, France Volcanic island of Jeju, South Korea Iwami Ginzan silver mine, Japan Parthian fortresses of Nisa, Turkmenistan Samarra archaeological city, Iraq Rideau Canal, Canada Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge, Bosnia-Herzegovina Teide National Park, Spain Primeval beech forests of the Carpathian, Ukraine Lope-Okanda, Gabon Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape, South Africa Twyfelfontein, Namibia Diaolou villages in Kaiping, ChinaI hope that the new...
Today is the fifth anniversary of the Rome Statute's entry into force. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued the following statement:1 July 2007 marks the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The creation of the Court represents one of the major achievements in international law during the past century....
A few blogs have recently been posting on security issues in Oceania. Since this is a topic we rarely cover, I wanted to point out a couple of posts that I found informative and enlightening. Coming Anarchy, which has organized the series of posts, has a piece on Oceania’s regions: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. (The post is actually by guest...
The Supreme Court term ended today. In terms of cases relevant to Opinio Juris readers, there was only one blockbuster case, Massachusetts v. EPA. We profited from various posts about that case already, including contributions from Hari Osofsky, Dan Bodansky, and John Knox. But beyond that one case, in my opinion there was nothing of significance this...
My colleague Michael Perino, who teaches and writes in the area of securities regulation, had the following comment regarding the sovereign wealth funds discussion in my earlier post:One point of perspective worth keeping in mind is that shareholders (despite some of the claims in the article) are quite weak in the US. In large part that weakness flows from collective...
Curtis Bradley has posted an advance version of a forthcoming piece in the Supreme Court Review on last term's decision in Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon. It's well worth a close read, although I think it ultimately makes too much out of a case that is at best way-station material. The piece for instance argues that Sanchez-Llamas is more important...
On Monday, I visited the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) here in Rome for a series of presentations on their legal offices and their current work (for an interesting take on a presentation we heard about the “right to food” check out my colleague David Hoffman’s views over at Concurring Opinions). Among the presentations, one struck me as...
It seems that in the first dozen years of the WTO there has been a tremendous amount of litigation about environmental protection and health measures. The key question in these cases often has been whether government action to advance such health and environmental concerns is consistent with WTO obligations. But what has been surprisingly absent from the WTO...
For better or for worse, Africa has become the leading testing ground for mechanisms of international criminal justice in this decade: e.g. Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. Generally speaking, African opinion makers have seemed pretty supportive of such processes, but there are signs of a backlash brewing. Uganda: As this report from the Independent reminds us, the...
The CIA has declassified the “Family Jewels.” (Press release here.) Also known as the “Book of Skeletons,” this document was compiled in 1973 under Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger, in the aftermath of the revelations from the Watergate investigation and other reports of CIA bad acts. Wanting to get a handle of the situation, of the skeletons in...
