If a priest engages in sexual abuse in Portland, Oregon, can victims of his abuse sue the Holy See? A federal district court in Oregon ruled last week that they could. In the case of Doe v. Holy See, available here, the plaintiff sued the Holy See for respondeat superior, negligence and fraud. The Holy...
Extending its string of decisions applying the political question doctrine to U.S. foreign policy, the U.S Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit Friday dismissed another lawsuit by a group fo Chileans alleging that former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was responsible for their torture, imprisonment, and abuse during the coup that brought Pinochet to power. The court's...
Today's game between Iran and Mexico is not without political controversy. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly denied that the Holocaust ever occurred, has indicated his desire to attend the World Cup competition. "If you make it to the second round, then I would try to join you." According to the New York Times, "German officials have been under pressure to...
I'm back, now blogging from the southern hemisphere. It's winter in Auckland — which means it's in the mid-60s. Because it's at the northern end of New Zealand, Auckland has a remarkably temperate climate, with temperatures rarely climbing higher than 85 or lower than 45. (I don't know if we have any readers in New Zealand, but...
A district court in the Hague has sentenced Gus Kouwenhoven to eight years in prison for smuggling weapons for Charles Taylor in violation of a UN arms embargo. In their ruling on Wednesday, the judges said Mr. Kouwenhoven's assistance to Mr. Taylor was "crucial," and suggested his motivations were not political, but rather "guided purely by financial interests." ...
Professor Louis B. Sohn died on Wednesday, June 7. He was 92. Professor Sohn was one of the most well-known American (by way of Poland) international lawyers of his generation – over the years, he taught, wrote about, and practiced international law in a wide variety of areas, including human rights, arms control, the environment, and the law of the...
Al Jazeera has some of the most appalling coverage of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that one could possibly imagine for a major news network. First, there is the lead story entitled "U.S., allies hail Zarqawi killing" which reports that family members of Zarqawi's beheaded victims had "mixed reactions" to the news of his death. The article concludes with...
The writers at Democracy Arsenal did some live-blogging at Tuesday's conference "Power and Superpower: Global Leadership for the 21st Century," an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Institute. While the msm focuses on Mark Malloch Brown's criticisms of US participation at the UN (fueled by "unchecked UN-bashing" in the US), and US Ambassador John...
As the rest of the media is focused on the very good news about the demise of Abu Masub al-Zarqawi (see Andrew Sullivan's round-up of perspectives here, here and here), I wanted to draw attention to an article in today's WSJ describing the ICC's problems with its prosecution of Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army. As Jess Bravin's...
World Cup competition is upon us. Although lost upon the general public, there are in fact complex rules of engagement that are elaborately set forth in FIFA regulations. Here is a brief synopsis of the laws of the World Cup. First, the Laws of the Game i.e., the rules of the pitch. Very little can be said that is not...
I’m wondering whether customary international law really exists anymore. No, I’m not talking about Posner and Goldsmith’s use of rational choice methodology to attack the normative value of customary international law; I’m not looking to quarrel with this blog’s namesake, opinio juris, or its effects on relations between states and other subjects of international law. Rather, my inquiry...
Following up on Julian's post, I think the problem is not fully appreciating the difficulty of justifying extraordinary renditions under international law, regardless of torture. Let's say someone is picked up and rendered to another country for interrogation. If we are not at war, then the full panoply of human rights law, including the ICCPR, to which we...
