Larry Helfer's post on the creation of new international tribunals presents the puzzle of why states create so many new institutions when they could, in theory, use existing institutions. I suspect that he is right that part of the answer is a desire to create more focused and technically expert tribunals. But perhaps states also desire more closely controlled tribunals...
It is by now old news that litigation above the level of the nation state has expanded exponentially over the last fifteen years. This expansion appears in three distinct forms. First, states have established more than a dozen new international courts and tribunals during that time period. Second, states are recognizing the jurisdiction of new and existing...
Actually, contrary to Professor Heller's explanation for HRW's behavior ("given the brevity of HRW's visit to Sreifa on July 31, the researchers would not have had time to interview residents to determine whether Hezbollah fighters had moved into the area; they would only have had time to determine whether there were any visible manifestations of their presence"), Human Rights Watch...
Professor Bell's latest post is extremely unfortunate. Instead of addressing his failure to quote HRW's sentence in its entirety, he not only spins the sentence to somehow support his criticism of the organization, he does so by subtly imputing that criticism to me: If Professor Heller believes that HRW is capable of having seen plausible signs of Hezbollah presence in...
Professor Heller insists that it is "excruciatingly clear" that the NYT sentence that reads "Mr. Kamaleldin, the Sreifa official, estimated that up to two-thirds of the town's homes and buildings were demolished, leaving more than 43 people buried in the rubble" refers to casualties from the August 13 attack alone. Perhaps it is clear to Professor Heller. For the rest of us,...
Once again Professor Bell misstates the August 16 New York Times article on which his argument about Hezbollah fighters depends. The article makes it excruciatingly clear that "43 people" refers not to the total number of casualties in Sreifa during the war, but to the number of casualties in the August 13 attack alone: Just days ago, Israeli warplanes pounded...
One of our frequent readers asked yesterday why delightful events like the APSA Happy Hour never occur on the West coast. Well, I can't quite promise to duplicate that event, but those in southern California may wish to know that on Wednesday, August 30, my home institution will host a symposium on the "Rookie Year of the Roberts Court"...
Another interesting false report of an Israeli war crime has popped up in the blogosphere. According to the ICRC, "on 23 July, at 11.15 pm in Cana, a village in southern Lebanon[, a]ccording to Lebanese Red Cross reports, two of its ambulances were struck by [Israeli] munitions, although both vehicles were clearly marked by the red cross emblem and...
And, finally, in reference to Professor Heller's piece, a little math: According to the HRW figures, at least 23 were killed in the July 13-19 Israeli attacks. According to the NYT story, on August 16, there were 43 total dead of which at list 22 ("most") were Hezbollah/Amal fighters. 43 less 23 is 20, which means that at least 2...
Professor Bell may stand by his critique of Human Rights Watch, but that doesn't make it any more accurate. Quite simply, he has offered almost no evidence that contradicts Ms. Whitson's claim that although Hezbollah fighters might have been in Sreifa during Israel's attack on August 13, there were no Hezbollah fighters there on July 13 and July 19,...
In rereading Ms. Whitson's defense of HRW's evidently false accusations of Israeli war crimes in Srifa, I noticed the following interesting phrase: "We documented ...
Sarah Leah Whitson, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division, takes issue with my critique of Human Rights Watch's anti-Israel bias. As I noted earlier, I critiqued HRW's accusation that Israel had committed war crimes by bombing the Lebanese village of Srifa, where, according to HRW, there was "no evidence that there had been...
