Brad Roth has sent along a link to this New York Times editorial, which begins: If a country sinks beneath the sea, is it still a country? That is a question about which the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral atolls — is now seeking expert legal advice. It is also a question the...
Julian's latest snide swipe at the ICC focuses on Bashir's visit to Kenya, which he describes as a "slap in the face to the ICC Prosecutor and the defenders of the Bashir arrest warrant." Not surprisingly, Julian conveniently fails to mention the details of Bashir's visit: Sudanese President Omar al Bashir curiously flew in through Nairobi’s Wilson Airport, and ...
So says a draft UN report that studied events in the Congo between 1993 and 2008: An exhaustive U.N. investigation into the history of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo has concluded that the Rwandan military and its allies carried out hundreds of large-scale killings of ethnic Hutu refugees during the 1990s that amounted to war crimes,...
It's not often that you run into a story that combines international arbitration, Kremlin politics, post-Soviet autocrats, utopian urban projects, transnational networks, electoral politics, and chess. So, read on...
So reports Reuters: The Dutch prosecutor's office said on Friday it would look into whether Dutch peacekeeping soldiers should face criminal charges over the 1995 massacre in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. About 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were killed at Srebrenica after Bosnian Serb forces overran the United Nations-protected enclave where Dutch troops were ...
Last month the Second Circuit issued a remarkable ruling that threatens to upend the longstanding rule of successor state liability for the credit obligations of predecessor states. It did so by ruling that the automatic assumption of liability of sovereign debt of the predecessor state under international law is not a “commercial activity” within the meaning of the FSIA....
[We are pleased to have David Glazier, a professor of law at Loyola Law School Los Angeles, share his thoughts on the U.S. District Court's recent interpretation of the piracy statute in U.S. v. Said] As I read Judge Jackson’s decision, the crux of his holding boils down to the following syllogism: (1) Federal criminal statutes must be interpreted according to the...
In the first U.S. court opinion on piracy since 1820, a U.S. judge in Norfolk, Virginia has dismissed piracy charges against Somali defendants in United States v. Said. The Court held that attempted piracy is not piracy for the purposes of U.S. criminal law. (h/t Eugene Volokh). As I mentioned in an earlier post, the relevant U.S. statute criminalizing piracy leaves...
Two commenters on my previous post on Kagame's increasing authoritarianism questioned whether Rwanda arrested Peter Erlinder because of his representation of defendants at the ICTR. Fortuitously, Kate Gibson -- my colleague on the Karadzic case and a defense attorney at the ICTR -- has just published an ASIL Insight on the arrest that supports my claim. Here is a taste...
Hell must have had central air conditioning installed, because I find myself in complete agreement with Ruth Wedgwood's recent post at EJIL: Talk! on Paul Kagame's rapid descent into authoritarianism. Here is a snippet: The West’s failure to address Tutsi violations of the laws of war has allowed Kagame to conclude, justifiably, that he can do nearly anything with...
Actually, I'm not, although I'm confident Labor will pull out the election. But I'm endlessly fascinated by the fact that people place bets on the outcome of the election -- and that the latest odds are treated as serious news by The Age, the best newspaper in Australia: Labor has been the subject of a huge betting plunge on it winning...