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29 Jul

[Oliver Windridge is a British lawyer specialising in international criminal and human rights law. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or any other organisations affiliated to the author.] A sometimes forgotten aspect of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s work is the transfer of 10 of its 13 outstanding cases back to Rwanda and to France for domestic prosecution. To be precise, of the 13 outstanding cases, the ICTR have transferred two currently detained accused to France (Bucyibaruta and Munyeshyaka) and two to Rwanda (Uwinkindi and Munyagishari). The remaining nine accused remain at large, of which the ICTR transferred seven to Rwanda for domestic prosecution if and when they are arrested (Sikubwabo, Ryandikayo, Ntaganzwa, Ndimbati, Munyarugarama, Mpiranya, Kayishema), while the Bizimana and Kabuga cases remain at the ICTR, or rather the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), the mechanism established to carry out functions, including trying outstanding cases, after the completion of the ICTR and ICTY mandates. But even if sometimes forgotten, transferred cases are likely to come back into the spotlight this year with MICT President Theodor Meron’s landmark 13 May 2015 decision to constitute a new referral chamber to examine whether Jean Uwinkindi, the first ICTR accused to be transferred to Rwanda, should remain in Rwanda for trial or be brought back under the auspices of the MICT for trial. As background, in 2011 Uwinkindi became the first ICTR accused to be transferred to Rwanda for domestic prosecution under Rule 11 bis of the ICTR Rules of Procedure and Evidence. This transfer was a watershed for the ICTR, and in particular the ICTR Prosecutor, who had tried and failed on several previous occasions to transfer cases to Rwanda, all of which were subsequently tried at the ICTR ( See Munyakazi, Gatete, Kanyarukiga and Hategekimana). Uwinkindi opposed the transfer mainly on fair trial concerns, however the Trial Chamber found that Rwanda had markedly improved its criminal justice system since denying previous applications for transfer mentioned above, and granted the Prosecution’s request to transfer, which was subsequently affirmed by the Appeals Chamber . In order to allay concerns over potential post-transfer issues, particularly over the availability and protection of witnesses, the transfer decision included a monthly monitoring system, designed to ensure any material violation of Uwinkindi’s fair trial rights in Rwanda would be brought to the attention of the ICTR President so that action, including possible revocation could be considered by the ICTR (and now MICT). The monitoring system also allowed the ICTR/MICT to examine any issues over future financial constraints including any failure by the Rwandan authorities to make counsel available or disburse funds. Therefore, since 2011 the ICTR/MICT has received monitoring reports on a monthly basis (all the reports can be accessed at the bottom of this page.). Importantly, in its 2011 referral decision the ICTR also granted Uwinkindi permanent standing to petition the ICTR/MICT. On 16 September 2013, Uwinkindi filed a request for revocation of the 2011 referral decision, stating that the Ministry of Justice of Rwanda had failed to make the necessary funds available for his defence to allow his team to contact defence witnesses and hire defence staff and that his counsel had not been paid since February 2013. On 12 March 2014, MICT President Meron, sitting as a single judge, dismissed Uwinkindi’s request for revocation, finding that the submissions on various funding issues had been either rendered moot or were still the focus of ongoing negotiations and may be subject to further review within the Rwandan courts. President Meron did not however rule out the filing of further requests for revocation should the circumstances warrant. In March 2015, the MICT monitor filed its March 2015 report, in which it stated, inter alia,
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24 Jul

As the fighting in Ukraine continues into its second year, recent reports have variously focused on the promise of a weapons withdrawal and the risk that there is the opening of a new front opening. Recent international legal scholarship has attempted to frame the conflict within the context of international law and consider topics such as issues of legality and...

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23 Jul

[Jean Galbraith is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.]  The Security Council’s voting procedures make it difficult to pass resolutions – and, typically, difficult to undo resolutions once passed. In an article published not long after the end of the Cold War, David Caron observed that while it is hard to address the difficulty of passing resolutions,...

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17 Jul

In late 2014, the Office of the Prosecutor rejected a request by Comoros to open a formal investigation into Israel's attack on the Mavi Marmara. To my great surprise, the Pre-Trial Chamber (Judge Kovacs dissenting) has now ordered the OTP to reconsider its decision. The order does not require the OTP to open a formal investigation, because the declination was based...

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15 Jul

[Dan Joyner is Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law.  He is the author of the forthcoming book Iran’s Nuclear Program and International Law, which is under contract with Oxford University Press, and is expected in print in 2016.] The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreed to by the P5+1 (Germany, France, the U.K., the U.S., China, Russia) and Iran on July 14 is a major success of international diplomacy, possibly to be credited with the avoidance of war.  It is the culmination of twenty months of negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran since the initial Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) was agreed by the parties in November 2013.  See my analysis here of the JPOA when it was concluded. The JCPOA is comprised of 159 total pages of text, consisting of 18 pages of the JCPOA itself, with a further 141 pages divided among five annexes.  All of the documents can be found at this link.  It is a carefully drafted, well organized document, and compliments are due its drafters. That being said, it is an extremely complex document, which attempts to address all of the issues in dispute between the parties concerning Iran’s nuclear program, from how many and what type of uranium enrichment centrifuges Iran can maintain in operation, to the technical specifications of transforming the Arak heavy water reactor into an alternate less-proliferation-sensitive design, to excruciatingly detailed provisions on the precise sequencing of sanctions lifting by the U.N. Security Council, the U.S. and the E.U. The general gist of the JCPOA is easy enough to summarize.  It is a quid pro quo agreement under which Iran agrees to significant limits on its civilian nuclear program, and to an enhanced inspection regime by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to verify the continued peaceful nature of its program.  In return, the P5+l agree to a coordinated lifting of the economic and financial sanctions that have been applied against Iran over the past six years by both the Security Council acting multilaterally, and the U.S. and E.U. in particular acting unilaterally.  The end goal of the JCPOA is stated to be that Iran will ultimately be treated as a normal nuclear energy producing state, on par with Japan, Germany and many other Non-Nuclear Weapon States party to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The precise sequencing of the implementation of the JCPOA’s commitments was one of the most difficult issues in the negotiations, and the JCPOA has one full annex, Annex V, devoted to the issue.  The implementation plan provides for approximately a 10 year timeline over which the main commitments are to be implemented by the parties.  Technically “UNSCR Termination Day,” on which all Security Council resolutions on Iran will terminate, and on which the Council will no longer be seized of the Iran nuclear issue, is set to occur 10 years from “Adoption Day,” which is scheduled for 90 days after the endorsement of the JCPOA by the Security Council. Sanctions relief will be staggered, but will begin in earnest on “Implementation Day,” on which date the IAEA will certify that Iran has implemented its primary commitments limiting its nuclear program.  This could occur within approximately six months from “Adoption Day.”  The final, full lifting of all multilateral and unilateral sanctions is set to occur on “Transition Day,” which is defined as 8 years from “Adoption Day,” or when the IAEA reports that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful use, whichever is earlier.  So the JCPOA envisions a full lifting of all nuclear-related sanctions on Iran within the next eight years at a maximum, with significant sanctions lifting to occur hopefully within the coming year. There are a number of important legal observations to make about the JCPOA text. 
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13 Jul

[Bede Sheppard is deputy children’s rights director at Human Rights Watch.] Eighty-years ago today, the United States became the first country to ratify the international treaty commonly known as the Roerich Pact. Actually, “commonly” is a bit of a stretch—the 80-year-old agreement doesn’t get a lot of attention these days—yet one of its key objectives has recently been in the spotlight. The pact’s...

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03 Jul

Laurie Blank published a post yesterday at Lawfare entitled "The UN Gaza Report: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose." The post accuses the Independent Commission of Inquiry's report on Operation Protective Edge ("Gaza Report") of "completely undermin[ing] the foundational notion of equal application of the law" with regard to three areas of IHL: warnings, civilian vs military objects, and compliance. None of Blank's...

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02 Jul

[Gregory H. Fox is Professor of Law and Director of the Program for International Legal Studies, Wayne State University Law School.] In the aftermath of the Iraq occupation, a vigorous debate began over the legitimacy of the Coalition Provisional Authority’s (CPA) vast reform of Iraqi legal, political and economic institutions (see Gregory H. Fox, The Occupation of Iraq, 36 Geo. J....

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23 Jun

We are very sorry to mark the passing of Professor Michael W. Lewis of Ohio Northern University. Mike spoke and wrote with rare authority as someone who was not only a leading international law and national security scholar who engaged in broader public discourse (see his many debates, presentations, and interviews), but also as a former Naval aviator and TOPGUN graduate,...

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18 Jun

[Asad Kiyani (LL.B (Osgoode); LL.M (Cambridge) is a PhD Candidate at the University of British Columbia (UBC).] While social and traditional media have been flooded with complaints about South Africa’s recent failure to arrest Omar al-Bashir, legal analysis of the situation has been lacking. Many have insisted that the reluctance to arrest al-Bashir is  ‘the impunity club’ disregarding legal principle and undermining the rule of law. Yet, given the widespread insistence that the ICC has jurisdiction over Bashir and he must be arrested by anyone who can do so, there is a remarkable lack of agreement on exactly how the treaty-based ICC has jurisdiction over the sitting head of state of a country that has not ratified said treaty, and when that head of state is protected by customary law immunities (see Gaeta vs Akande, which inspired my article on the same). For reasons of space, this post does not address the claim that there is already a rule of customary international law that provides an exception to head of state immunity. That position frequently involves the same errors: conflating the immunities of former heads of state (such as Pinochet) with incumbent heads of state, and conflating the elimination of the substantive defence of official capacity with elimination of the procedural bar of immunities. Nor does it deal with peace versus justice arguments, the specificities of South African constitutional law, or perhaps the more promising, genocide-based arguments in favour of arresting al-Bashir highlighted by Göran Sluiter. Instead, this post problematises the assertion that states refusing to arrest al-Bashir have no legal legs to stand on by highlighting four interrelated public international law issues raised by the legal pursuit of al-Bashir. (1) There has been no reconciliation of the apparent internal contradictions in the Rome Statute: that states are obligated to carry out ICC decisions while also respecting the customary duties they owe to other states, particularly third-party states. Article 27(2) of the Rome Statute waives states’ customary protections of immunities. At the same time, Article 98(1) states that persons clothed in immunity can only be arrested by or surrendered to the Court if “the Court can first obtain the cooperation of that third State for the waiver of the immunity.” Sudan has clearly not consented to this waiver, and is not cooperating with the Court to waive al-Bashir’s immunity. At the same time, the Court insists that al-Bashir is to be arrested. Thus States Parties to the ICC are faced with competing obligations written into the Statute itself: to arrest al-Bashir while also observing his immunity from arrest. Arguments that there is no contradiction nullify these important provisions of the Rome Statute, and ignore the treaty-law implications of doing so. (2) Importantly, the Article 98(1) provision is not just a treaty-based rule; it is the assertion of pre-existing principles of public international law that (a) preclude placing treaty obligations on third-party states, and (b) recognize customary law immunities. Thus, even if the Court were to interpret Article 98(1) differently, or the Assembly of State Parties were to delete it from the Rome Statute (a virtual impossibility), the same restrictions would still apply to states such as South Africa because those rules exist in international law independent of the Rome Statute. These restrictions also apply to the Security Council, even when acting under Chapter VII. While the Security Council has extensive powers in international law, the general scholarship (see, e.g., here, here, here, here, and here) and jurisprudence makes clear that - contrary to Jens Ohlin’s interpretation of Article 103 of the UN Charter - the Council is restrained by the norms of customary international law. Thus, as far as al-Bashir goes, it makes no difference that the Council referred Darfur to the ICC through a Chapter VII resolution. Insisting that Chapter VII can override customary international law - no matter how awful the person protected by it may be - collapses the agreement/custom distinction first made in Article 103 of the Charter and preserved in Article 98 of the Rome Statute. Additionally, it raises the question of what legal limitations do exist on the Council, and how this interpretation fits with the Tadić court’s view (here at para. 28). Of course, this does not render Security Council referrals null – it simply restricts the pool of situations that the Council may refer to the Court.
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