In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Europe

17 Dec

I want to interrupt our Copenhagen focus to briefly flag a conversation that's on-going over at EJIL: Talk!  My Temple Law colleague, Jeff Dunoff, along with Joel Trachtman (The Fletcher School) recently put out a new work--Ruling the World? Constitutionalism, International Law and Global Governance (Cambridge, 2009), which is the focus of EJIL's latest on-line symposium.  Here's a description of the book project in brief: Ruling...

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08 Dec

Der Spiegel has an excellent story on the possibility that a Eurozone country might default on its sovereign debt, with economic, political, and legal consequences that could be anything from serious to dire.  The country is Greece: Greece has already accumulated a mountain of debt that will be difficult if not impossible to pay off. The government has borrowed more than...

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03 Dec

[This is a guest post by Professor Greg Gordon of the University of North Dakota.  Professor Gordon is the Director of the UND Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies, an expert on international criminal law and a past guest blogger at Opinio Juris.] Earlier this week, Spanish National Court Judge Balthazar Garzon initiated money laundering proceedings against the widow...

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02 Dec

I will write on this at greater length in a couple of days after a few of the key parties have made their arguments. For now, I just want to note that the oral proceeding transcripts will be available here. In the Tuesday morning session (which is all that has been posted at the time of this writing), Serbia set out...

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30 Nov

Americans who defend the legality of the invasion of Iraq almost invariably point to the fact that Britain's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, also approved the invasion.  That argument has always been questionable; rumours have long circulated that Lord Goldsmith did not believe that the invasion was legal, but was pressured by Downing Street into approving it anyway. According to an explosive...

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27 Nov

I criticize the Registry regularly, so it's important to acknowledge when it does something right.  I blogged a couple of weeks ago about the Registry's indefensible position that Dr. Karadzic's trial had not started, so the defence team was not entitled to any funding until the trial "began" in March.  The Registry has now reversed its decision and approved 250...

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11 Nov

Another day, another attempt by the Registry to undermine the fairness of Dr. Karadzic's trial. Rule 3.3 of the Registry's Remuneration Scheme for Persons Assisting Indigent Self-Represented Accused provides that a self-representing defendant's legal team is entitled to be paid for "a maximum of 150 out-of-court preparation hours...

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08 Nov

Both Martin Holterman and Sasha Greenawalt have questioned my repeated -- and quite deliberate -- insistence that "no competent barrister will accept appointment as stand-by counsel under these circumstances," and that any barrister who does accept the appointment will thus "be interested in one thing and one thing only: the free publicity that comes with it."  Martin's comment is the...

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05 Nov

Compare the following.  First, Reed Stevenson for Reuters: Yugoslavia tribunal judges ordered legal counsel for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and adjourned his trial until March 2010 to give the new defence lawyers time to prepare. Karadzic has been acting as his own attorney and has been boycotting the trial which charges him with some of Europe's worst atrocities since World...

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05 Nov

As most readers probably know by now, the Trial Chamber has decided to adjourn Dr. Karadzic's trial until 1 March 2010 and appoint stand-by counsel who will step in if, at that time, Dr. Karadzic continues to boycott the trial.  Here are the relevant paragraphs from the decision: 19. On the issue of continuing the trial in the absence of the...

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02 Nov

Niamh Hayes, a PhD candidate the Irish Centre for Human Rights and an intern on the Karadzic case, has a very useful guest post at the International Law Bureau about how the Trial Chamber might respond to Dr. Karadzic's boycott.  The entire post is well worth a read, but I was particularly struck by Niamh's suggestion that Dr. Karadzic's actions...

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