In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Foreign Relations Law

17 May

I realize that it's foolish to expect accuracy from the Wall Street Journal's editorial page, but it has outdone itself with the following statement, part of an editorial lavishing praise on Obama for resurrecting the military commissions: Another red herring is supposedly tightening the admissibility of hearsay evidence. Tribunal judges already have discretion to limit such evidence, and the current rules...

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13 May

With a few obvious exceptions, I try to avoid directly criticizing scholars with whom I disagree.  But I feel compelled to say a few words about a recent Jurist editorial in which a professor, a former Army JAG (a group for whom I have the utmost respect), argues that waterboarding is not torture.  (It also argues that a CIA interrogator...

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04 May

It has gone all but unnoticed in the U.S. but Russia has declared victory in its fight against Chechen rebels. Chechnya had become a byword for a place of chaos and random violence perpetrated by all sides, especially since the first Chechen War of 1994-1996.   But a recent report by the Times of London concerning Russian black operations in the...

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29 Apr

For a while there, it looked as if there might be a real fight over Harold Koh's nomination as State Department Legal Adviser. The Republicans have been casting about for a nomination that they could defeat on some issue of principle (that is, over something not involving a nominee's tax returns), along the lines of Lani Guinier's failed nomination...

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29 Apr

The Eleventh Circuit earlier this month ruled that Manuel Noriega could be extradited to France following the completion of his sentence in Florida. In Noriega v. Pastrana, Noriega argued that under the Third Geneva Convention he was entitled to automatic and immediate repatriation to Panama as soon as his criminal sentence was complete. However, Section 5 of the...

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27 Apr

The National Court has reassigned the case from Judge Garzon to Judge Eloy Velasco.  CNN says that "Judge Velasco is thought to have little, if any, experience in these kinds of cases."  Apparently, CNN has never heard of The Google, because it took me about 30 seconds to learn that, in January, Judge Velasco relied on Spain's universal jurisdiction law...

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22 Apr

U.S. prosecutors charged the sole surviving Somali pirate from the Maersk Alabama incident, Abduwali Muse, yesterday on charges of piracy, conspiracy to seize a ship by force, discharging a firearm during a ship seizure, conspiracy to commit hostage-taking and brandishing a firearm during a hostage taking.  The list of reported charges seems to confirm Eugene Kontorovich's suggestion yesterday in a great post over at...

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18 Apr

More evidence that the CIA interrogators did not rely in good faith on the OLC memos: Bradbury's 30 May 2005 memo acknowledges (p. 37) that the CIA Inspector General's report found that the CIA waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah 83 times in August 2002.  That regime far surpasses the CIA's own internal guidelines...

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