In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Europe

17 Sep

The Trial Chamber in Karadzic has instructed the prosecution to reduce the scope of its indictment from monstrous and completely unworkable to somewhat less monstrous and somewhat less completely unworkable.  The result?  Victims groups burning judges and prosecutors (and my client) in effigy and threatening not to cooperate with the prosecution: Several hundred members of victims' associations have protested in front...

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14 Sep

Adjudicating Europe, a new blog dedicated to EU law, has just launched.  Here's how the editors describe it: EU Law, despite its expansion and maturity, has not yet developed a comparable blogsphere of its own. Languages, the vastness of its scope, or a tendency to work and discuss inside national communities, have probably influenced this lack of blogging culture among EU...

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08 Sep

Orin Kerr has an interesting post at Volokh noting a story reporting that NSA intercepts were used in the just announced conviction in the UK of terrorists in the liquid-mixing-chemicals case.  Orin is right in saying the story deserves more notice than it will probably get.  I found it particularly interesting that apparently a reason why the NSA finally signed...

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08 Sep

The Ninth Circuit last week argued that it did not have personal jurisdiction over DaimlerChrysler Corporation AG because it did not have continuous and systematic contacts with the forum. The case of Bauman v. DaimlerChrysler AG arose out of the alleged kidnapping, detention and torture of Argentinian citizens in Argentina by Argentinian state security forces acting at the direction...

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01 Sep

The blog Making Sense of Darfur has been hosting a symposium on Adam M. Smith's book After Genocide: Bringing the Devil to Justice, in which the author argues -- oversimplifying only slightly -- that international criminal trials are always inferior to domestic trials and non-punitive accountability mechanisms.  I have neither the time nor the inclination to address the book's claims...

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23 Aug

Ruth Wedgwood comments at Forbes magazine website on the "compassionate" release of Al-Megrahi from prison in Scotland.  I agree overall with Ruth: Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, is now a free man. He was convicted in the specially created Hague trial court by a panel of Scottish judges, and his appeal was rejected by the Scottish appellate chamber. He remained in prison...

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27 Jul

Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is in trouble in the UN, according to a dismayed account in this week's Economist ("An idea whose time has come - and gone?" Economist, July 25, 2009, p 58).  I'm dismayed, too. At the 2005 UN reform summit of the General Assembly, says the Economist the biggest-ever gathering of world leaders accepted the principle that they have...

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26 Jul

Rather than comment on the refreshingly tough realism or seriously imprudent bear-baiting of Vice-President Biden's recent remarks on Russia ("Russia will bend to the US"), or whether there is an important and dangerous gap between short-term and long-term in the collapse of an imperial nuclear power even if the long-run claim is true, etc., let me instead offer a background...

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24 Jul

For critics of universal jurisdiction, Spain's UJ statute has become the poster child for accusations of excess. How strange it seems that roughly ten years ago it was so widely celebrated as the provision that brought down General Augusto Pinochet. Spain's indicting the former Chilean dictator and Britain's detaining him on the attendant arrest warrant and extradition request...

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23 Jul

A couple of weeks ago, Sweden did something unprecedented for an EU nation -- it indicated it would proceed with the extradition of an accused Rwandan génocidaire to Kigali. Sylvere Ahorugeze, a 53-year-old former director of Rwanda's civil aviation authority, is implicated in the 1994 murder of a group of civilians in the Kigali suburb of Gikondo. He...

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21 Jul

British Justice Secretary Jack Straw recently proposed amending the United Kingdom's International Criminal Court Act of 2001 (which permits universal jurisdiction prosecution of atrocity crimes) to allow authorities to file cases for atrocities committed as far back as January 1, 1991. This would close a loophole that has been giving safe haven to génocidaires who enter the UK after...

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