President Bush announced today that he is transferring 14 suspects from CIA custody to detention at Guantanamo Bay, including alleged Al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed. This would, according to Bush, remove all detainees from CIA custody. During the same speech, Bush argued that the CIA prisons had been crucial to the ability of the U.S. government to...
I wanted to offer one other quick report on last week’s symposium at Pepperdine on the Rookie Year of the Roberts Court. As you might expect, Hamdan featured prominently in the discussion. In essence we saw with Professors Doug Kmiec and Erwin Chemerinsky a tale of two Hamdans. You can view both of their presentations here under...
UN Watch has issued this comprehensive assessment of the first three months of the new UN Human Rights Council. Here's the bottom line from the executive summary: The imposition of public scrutiny to the election process led to some improvements: former Commission members Sudan and Zimbabwe did not seek Council membership this year, and Iran was not elected. However, the...
Following up on my earlier post, the ICTR isn't happy that Tanzanian police have arrested Gakwaya. The Tribunal's Registrar has released the following statement:Following the arrest of Defence Counsel Callixte Gakwaya, Lead Counsel for the accused Yusuf Munyakasi, on Friday 1 September 2006, the Registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), Mr Adama Dieng, expressed his strong...
I have to say I disagree with Roger and John Knox about August’s case of the month. As important as I think the ATCA has become, I think the case Julian flagged last week--NRDC v. EPA—has far greater implications. Indeed, there’s already a fairly lengthy discussion of the case over at the Volokh Conspiracy (see here and here). ...
Alan Wolfe started a thread over at The New Republic’s new Open University by suggesting that the recent APSA was too focused on things foreign as opposed to things domestic. I was there, too (to do a panel on birthright citizenship and to take in the excellent roundtable on international tribunals, among a few others). But my impression,...
One of the more interesting parts of the symposium last week at Pepperdine on the Rookie Year of the Roberts Court were the comments of Supreme Court correspondents David Savage, Gina Holland and Marcia Coyle. You can view their comments here. I thought it was quite interesting that Marcia Coyle, Washington Bureau Chief and U.S. Supreme Court Correspondent for...
Jeremy Rabkin has this piece in the Weekly Standard on what the latest Mideast conflict has to say about IL. As is true of Rabkin's other work, it's nicely argued and knowledgeable. Without getting into the substance of the particular issues (Rabkin's take here hinges on classifying standards of proportionality as something other than customary international law to...
According this report out of Australia, in early July Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks was granted UK citizenship only to be stripped of the status the very next day. The British courts had confirmed Hicks' claim to the British tie through his London-born mother. Hicks apparently hoped that British citizenship would lead to his release (as has been...
On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris, I am delighted to announce that Professor Peter Spiro has accepted our invitation to become a permanent contributor to the blog. As anyone who followed his (remarkably prolific) guest stint knows, Peter brings a wealth of experience and insight to blogging and has expertise in areas of law that complement...
Reuters has a short but fascinating article on Nazi techniques for disseminating coded messages during WW II, including hiding morse code in drawings of fashion models:Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings. They posted the letters to their handlers, hoping that counterespionage experts would be fooled by the seemingly innocent...
