Here are some of the slogans that were on display during the French student revolts of 1968: Nous ne voulons pas d'un monde où la certitude de ne pas mourir de faim s'échange contre le risque de mourir d'ennui. (We want nothing of a world in which the certainty of not dying from hunger comes in...
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs had a very brief press conference in Algeria yesterday where he endorsed Algeria's Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation (for a brief summary see here). The Charter was suspiciously but overwhelmingly endorsed by a referendum last year and ends judicial proceedings against alleged extremist Islamic terrorists. Of course, it...
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has published a great study on the impact of trade liberalization on developing countries under different scenarios currently contemplated at the Doha Round of negotiations. The press release is here and the full text is here. The press release describes the study as follows:"As the global trade regime has expanded to include most developing...
As the world continues to wring its hands over the slow-motion genocide in Darfur, libertarian legal scholars are beginning to point out one possible solution that doesn't involve the United Nations or even NATO: Arm the victims of the Sudanese genocide. Indeed, they would go farther and enshrine an international human right to resist genocide, that includes the right...
From the department of the obscure but important news, the U.S., Japan, and Australia have been holding a "Trilateral Dialogue" on security issues (see a joint statement released today here). On its face, all this means is that the three countries will have regular ministerial-level consultations, which doesn't seem very important. Certainly, it is a far...
The ICC held a hearing for Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, its first arrestee, today. He has a provisional defence counsel and will get a full hearing in June. According to the BBC, Lubanga is a rebel warlord leading a group battling rivals from the Lendu ethnic group, partly for control of large deposits of gold in the Democratic Republic of...
Voice of America reports that an Afghan man, Abdul Rahman, is facing the death penalty for converting to Christianity from Islam, a capital offense under Afghanistan's Islamic law. The case points to an fundamental tension in the new Afghan constitution. On the one hand, the constitution declares Afghanistan an "Islamic Republic" (Ch. 1, Art. 2) and prohibits...
There is a nice article in the New Republic on the memory of Milosevic by a former member of the ICTY prosecution team, Mark Vlasic. Here is an excerpt:There will be no mention today of Slobodan Lazarevic, the Serbian spy who testified that Milosevic used the war in Croatia as a way to divert Serbian attention from dissatisfaction over...
Behold the new face of the anti-war movement. Sure, she's pretty. And I'm completely on board with the "no war" sentiment. But why does she have — as Josh Marshall astutely points out — a Mercedes-Benz symbol on the other side of her face? Have the hippies been so soon forgotten? Or is she trying...
Read this article about Iranian women seeking gender equality in its simplest terms: at the football pitch. "The battle is for equal gender rights and opportunities, from all-encompassing issues to smaller ones such as the right to watch matches in a football stadium." When the women organized a campaign to watch the football match, they were escorted onto a bus,...
Kevin's post on the Iraqi-Al Qaeda relationship suggests that there is little evidence of a colloborative relationship in the recently released Iraq files. This might or might not be true, but (because Opinio Juris is fair and balanced), we should also consider evidence from those files showing Saddam's Iraq had connections with, and perhaps plans to work with,...
Here's a story you don't see every day:NAVY EXCHANGES FIRE WITH SUSPECTED PIRATES DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Two U.S. Navy warships exchanged gunfire with suspected pirates Saturday off the coast of Somalia, and one suspect was killed and five others were wounded, the navy said. Twelve suspects were taken into custody after the early-morning shootout, said Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown, spokesman...
