I'm just back from 9 days in Madrid -- my first visit, and it was great. Of course, while there I couldn't ignore the international law-related story of the day. Judge Baltasar Garzón (of Pinochet, al Qaeda, and Eta fame) is at it again. This time he's agreed to open a criminal investigation into thousands of disappearances and executions surrounding...
Serbia might want the ICJ to opine on the legality of Kosovo's independence, but it seems that the horse is already out of the barn. Even Macedonia and Montenegro have now recognized Kosovo, the latter particularly irking the Serbian government: Montenegro's announcement sparked outrage in Belgrade, which along with key ally Russia has been vehemently opposing the split. Serbia in a...
I don't even know where to begin with this one. I'll let the BBC tell the story: Comic actor Bolek Polivka is suing former business partner Tomas Harabis over the rights to the fictitious Wallachian Kingdom. The [Czech] court must decide whether Mr Polivka is the true "king" of the fairy-tale realm...
So the financial crisis has definitively moved from being a Wall Street phenomenon featuring a certain amount of European schadenfreude to a global crisis in which European banks are just as involved as American ones. That it is a global crisis and not merely an American one means two things. First, early on in this financial mess, the sense that...
Two interesting trials involving very old defendants began last week. The first, in Poland, involves General Wojciech Jaruzelski, who orchestrated the Polish government's brutal repression of Solidarity in 1981: The 85-year-old man, who was once the very symbol of communist repression, faces a possible ten-year jail sentence for “directing a criminal organisation” – a reference to the Military Council that imposed...
Spiegel Online has posted a fascinating interview with Rafi Eitan, a former Mossad agent who is now a minister in the Israeli cabinet. According to Eitan, Mengele was also in Buenos Aires when Eichmann was captured -- and would have shared Eichmann's fate but for the Mossad's lack of boots on the ground: SPIEGEL: Josef Mengele fled Germany for South America...
I have blogged in the past about the growing phenomenon of 'libel tourism' and its chilling effects upon free expression, as well as some (really, considering the free expression issues under threat, quite modest) New York state and US federal legislative efforts to deal with it. It amounts to using English courts and their views on libel, together with the...
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my experiences in Georgia in the early 1990s, monitoring the various conflicts - Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the then-Georgian civil war in Tbilisi. I noted that those secessionist conflicts were marked on each side by ethnic cleansing as extreme as anything I saw in the Yugloslav wars (a country which I also...
Take a look at this commentary about Russia invading Georgia: In order to be able to deny the invasion of Russian troops, it was first stated that some villages on the Georgian frontier had revolted, embittered by the tyranny of the, Georgians...
I have this gnawing suspicion that the only two law professors deeply interested in battlefield robotics are Glenn Reynolds and me. Nonetheless, when it comes to battlefield bots and the law, you can take satisfaction that you will have Heard It Here First, unless, of course, you read Instapundit. As I've said in earlier posts on this subject (and here and...
For anyone following the situation in Georgia and US/ Russian relations, there was a very interesting statement and Q&A today from Secretary of State Rice, who is in Brussels for meetings at NATO. Among other things, she announced the creation of a new NATO-Georgia cooperative framework and also discussed the concerns about isolating Russia. Among other topics, she also answered questions about...
Following is a statement that Secretary of State Rice made today in Tbilisi regarding the sirtuation in Georgia, the cease-fire agreement, and next steps. I have also included an excerpt from her Q&A with reporters and highlighted throughout a few parts that I thought were particularly interesting. SECRETARY RICE: Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, as President Bush noted in his statement a couple...
