As Kevin has noted, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has annoyed the current government of Rwanda in a variety of cases, most recently from its decision to plea bargain a defendant charged with genocide. This recent commentary from East Africa (HT: War Crimes Prosecution Watch) sums up some of the local frustration with the ICTR, which is planning...
The American Society of International Law has named Betsy Andersen as their new Executive Director to replace Charlotte Ku. Kudos to Betsy, who will ably serve one of the most important international law societies in the world. Details here. ...
Today I had the good fortune to have a private tour of the Alabama Room at the Hôtel de Ville in Geneva, Switzerland, one of the most famous rooms in the history of international law. Two parts of the room were particularly interesting. One was the prominent display of a sculpture of a plowshare made from swords. The other were...
The Washington Post has just launched a new law blog called Bench Conference by Andrew Cohen of CBS News. The Washington Post now has over twenty blogs that it sponsors, and they even include comments. Kudos to the Washington Post for embracing the blogosphere in such a serious way. Here is an excerpt from his first post entitled...
As Peggy noted below, a group of Israeli diplomats and Holocaust survivors is lobbying Israel to bring a case against Iran in the International Court of Justice under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. As Roger has forcefully noted in previous posts, Iran's President has made some pretty hostile comments about Israel saying it should be...
Australian military forces have taken control of security in Dili, the capital of the troubled nation of East Timor. The Australian forces are there at the invitation of the East Timor government, which is struggling with violence within its own military forces. Although Australia is at pains to emphasize its limited role in East Timor, Australia is clearly going to...
Faisal Kutty of York University has recently published a paper on the role of Shari'a law in international commercial arbitration. You can download the paper here. Here is the abstract: The world has witnessed a phenomenal growth in commercial disputes transcending national borders due to our increasingly interrelated and globalized world economy. In addition to issues in interpretation of...
If you were commissioned to design a museum to memorialize war, how would you design it? You can easily imagine how a Museum of Tolerance, or a Holocaust Memorial Museum, or an Air and Space Museum should be designed. But what emphasis would you give to a museum about war? Would it be pro-war or anti-war? Would it lament the...
Back in March, Kevin posted and I commented on the prosecution of Abdul Rahman for apostasy in Afghanistan. Rahman was ultimately deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial, and the case was dropped. Kyai Haji Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, published an editorial opposing the criminalization of apostasy in yesterday's Washington Post. Wahid makes several arguments, based on text...
A couple of weeks ago David Zaring had an interesting post about his informal study of the most frequently-cited international law cases. Thanks to this post by Paul Caron, I recently came across a list of the most frequently-cited Supreme Court cases. One of the top ten most frequently-cited cases is a Supreme Court international case that was rendered in the...
Human Rights First is providing blog coverage of the court martial of Sgt. Santos Cardona, a former Abu Ghraib guard and dog handler accused of abusive treatment of detainees. This trial looks to be significant given the defense theory that the abuses that occured at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere in Iraq "migrated" from Guantanamo, where practices like "waterboarding"...
According to this report, a group of former Israeli diplomats and parliamentarians believe that Iranian President Ahmedinijad's recent remarks calling for the destruction of Israel and his description of the Holocaust as myth constitute conspiracy to commit genocide and incitement of genocide. They want to sue Ahmedinijad. The potential suit raises some interesting questions of jurisdiction....
