[Susan Benesch is a Fellow at the Center for Applied Legal Studies at Georgetown Law Center and a former guest blogger here at Opinio Juris.] Simon Bikindi, the Rwandan pop star whose two-year trial at the ICTR was apparently the first attempt to criminalize music in international law, was just convicted of incitement to genocide but not, after all, for his...
My favorite Darfur blogger, Michelle at Stop Genocide, has asked me to post the following plea. I am, of course, happy to oblige. If you want to vote, vote soon -- the deadline is January 15 at 5 pm EST. And please pass Michelle's request on to anyone else you think might be interested. I am writing today to seek your...
Look closely at this photo of a parachute containing ransom money landing on a hijacked vessel in Somalia. Taken by the U.S. Navy, the photo, and this unusually insightful Time piece, details what I sort of predicted a couple of weeks ago. The ballyhooed international effort, sanctioned by the UN Security Council, to suppress Somali pirates is going nowhere, mostly...
Amos Guiora has an essay up on Jurist concerning the Israeli military operations in Gaza. He writes: The IDF launched Cast Lead after two significant developments: Hamas had fired 6,000 missiles from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel during the past three years after Israel had unilaterally disengaged from the Gaza Strip and Hamas had unilaterally violated an Egyptian negotiated cease-fire. This...
You can follow the earlier blog posts for my views on closing Guantanamo and the evolution of policy around it ...
Those who defend Israel's use of armed force -- in Gaza and elsewhere -- often complain that critics reflexively assume the worst about Israel's intentions. There is more than a grain of truth to that, but Israel doesn't help itself with its inability to admit that faulty intelligence sometimes leads it to make mistakes. Case in point: the attack on...
Philippe Sands gave an extensive interview on NPR's Fresh Air yesterday. Sands is already on record with his view that torture has occurred as a part of U.S. detention policy at GTMO and that high level officials are responsible for these acts. Although I'm not sure he had much new to say, his careful and eloquent arguments make for easy listening. ...
I met my client yesterday for the first time. For obvious reasons, I cannot recount the substance of what he, I, and his legal associate, Peter Robinson, discussed. But I thought readers might be interested in my impressions of the visit and my sense of Dr. Karadzic, which bears little resemblance to the image portrayed in the media. First,...
The New York Times has a thoughtful piece by Adam Liptak this weekend on the Obama Administration’s difficult choice in its forthcoming brief in the Supreme Court case of al-Marri v. Pucciarelli. Essentially, the Obama Administration will have to choose between continued detention, deportation to a third country, or prosecution. Each choice is perilous. If...
John Pike, of GlobalSecurity.org website, has a provocative op-ed in today's Washington Post (January 4, 2009, B3) arguing that the evolution of battlefield robots might mean robots as the soldiers that do the killing on future battlefields: Within a decade, the Army will field armed robots with intellects that possess, as H.G. Wells put it, "minds that are to our minds...
According to the ever-reliable Sudan Vision Daily, the Pre-Trial Chamber has already decided to issue the arrest warrant for Bashir: The entire Sudanese people will not be surprised if the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against the Sudanese President Omer Al-Bashir because the decision of the ICC judges was circulated by the UN chief Ban KI-moon, the US State...
Comments like this one, made not by some obscure commenter but by David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason and a member of The Volokh Conspiracy, in response to my Dershowitz post below: Herein the phoniness of international law. Humble Law Student has raised several significant questions with Heller’s analysis, including whether it matters under international law, as it surely...
