President Obama emerged from his campaign bunker to face the press, and he issued what the NYT seems to think is a pretty serious military threat against Syria. “We cannot have a situation in which chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Mr. Obama said in response to questions at an impromptu news conference at...
I've been trapped in an August blogging-slump. But I am roused to my keyboard by the surge of territorial disputes in Asia. China has aggressively asserted ever stronger and more expansive claims in the South China Sea, sparking dissension amongst the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and serious protests in Vietnam and the Philippine. China, Taiwan, and Japan are...
As I noted last week, I have just finished a long chapter critically assessing the work of the Human Rights Council-created International Commission of Inquiry on Libya (COI). My basic conclusion is that although the COI generally did an excellent job, particularly in terms of its fact-finding methodology, it seems clear that it was less interested in holding the rebels...
I honestly believed that the Libyan government couldn't make a public claim more ridiculous than the one about the Swatch with a hidden camera and GPS locator. Silly me for my lack of imagination! Mark Kersten, whose Justice in Conflict blog should be prominently featured in your newsreader, called my attention to this recent gem from the prosecutor in charge...
For you, dear reader, I risked life and limb to obtain the schematics of the video/GPS Swatch that the OPCD's interpreter used to undermine Libya's national security. After assuming deep cover, prowling some of the world's most dangerous locales, and making contact with too many shadowy characters to count, I finally succeeded. Here it is -- look at your own...
At Justice in Conflict, Mark Kersten calls attention to a recent motion filed by the Libyan government asking for more time -- read: stalling -- to reply to the OPCD's response to its admissibility challenge. The government doesn't actually want a deadline to respond; it would like to have 18 days from whenever it gets around to appointing a new...
In my previous post, I noted that Libya's admissibility challenge should fail regarding Saif Gaddafi because the government cannot demonstrate that it is able to obtain him from the Zintan militia that is holding him. It's now clear that the Libyan government has even less chance of obtaining al-Senussi: Mauritania's president has said former Libyan intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senussi must be...
In my earlier post on Libya's admissibility challenge, I explained how the Libyan government's failure to provide Saif with due process could be relevant to the admissibility of the case against him. There is, however, a far stronger argument against Libya's admissibility challenge, one that I've discussed before: namely, that Article 17(3) deems a case admissible if "the State is...
In my post on the detention of Melinda Taylor and her team, I mentioned that the "guard" planted by the Libyan government to spy on the OPCD's official meeting with Saif first intervened when Saif tried to sign a statement describing his attitude toward the Libyan criminal-justice system. I thought readers might be interested in the statement itself: Unsigned statement/sentiments from...
I have just uploaded a new essay to SSRN, entitled "The International Commission of Inquiry on Libya: A Critical Analysis." The essay is a chapter of a book on international commissions of inquiry that is being edited by the LSE's Jens Meierhenrich. Here is the introduction: This chapter provides a critical assessment of the International Commission of Inquiry on Libya, established...
Of all my writing, my article on the relationship between national due process and the Rome Statute's principle of complementarity is almost certainly the most unpopular. (Except in the OTP.) My thesis is a simple one: the failure of a national investigation or prosecution to live up to international standards of due process does not make a case admissible before...
The OPCD has filed its formal response to Libya's admissibility challenge. It's a monster of a brief -- 92 pages -- so it will take a number of posts to deal with it adequately. In this first post, I want to pull together the various sections of the brief that provide unprecedented detail concerning Melinda Taylor's detention. Before I do,...
