In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Regions

24 Sep

Seemingly more interested in placating victims groups than the judges who will determine Dr. Karadzic's guilt or innocence, prosecutors have refused to trim their monstrous and completely unworkable indictment: In written submissions released by the tribunal Tuesday, prosecutors say further cutting down their 11-count indictment against Karadzic to squeeze it into a year would prevent them presenting evidence encompassing all his...

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22 Sep

As part of the backlash against the Goldstone Commission's recommendation that the Security Council refer the situation in Gaza to the ICC if Israel and Hamas do not conduct credible investigations of their crimes, the far-right Jerusalem Post published an editorial today entitled "Strange Justice: The ICC, Europe, and the World."  The editorial was ostensibly written by a Researcher at...

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21 Sep

According to Newsweek, the answer may well be yes: As chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno-Ocampo has so far steered clear of controversial cases. In doing so, he hoped to allay U.S. fears that the ICC would become a politicized tool for settling scores. Which is why it's so surprising that Moreno-Ocampo is now considering an investigation into...

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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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15 Sep

You can find all 574 pages of it here.  From the press release: The UN Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone on Tuesday released its long-awaited report on the Gaza conflict, in which it concluded there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed...

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14 Sep

Although often critical of Israel, I have always been sympathetic to Israeli claims that the UN Human Rights Council has deliberately appointed individuals to investigate conditions in the Palestinian territories who were either actually biased against Israel or who at least could not avoid the appearance of bias.  I was completely opposed, for example, to the HRC's decision to appoint...

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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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10 Sep

I don't have any deeper insight into the situation than Ken, but there certainly has been pressure on the Prosecutor to investigate Afghanistan for some time -- both because it's not in Africa and because of US/NATO involvement in the armed conflict there.  It is important to stress, though, that the OTP has not formally opened an investigation; it is...

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09 Sep

Adam has kindly allowed me to post his response -- which first appeared at Making Sense of Darfur -- to my criticism of his claim that domestic trials or a TRC would likely have been better than the IMT.  Here it is, in full: Neither truth commissions nor domestic trials are as black and white as Professor Heller’s critique of my...

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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

I have been ignoring the latest salvos in David Bernstein's lonely war against Human Rights Watch, because they have not purported to be anything other than character assassination.  But his latest effort to discredit Marc Garlasco, HRW's Senior Military Analyst, is so beyond the pale of acceptable discourse that something needs to be said.  Here are the relevant paragraphs of...

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