Two posts today by ostensibly progressive bloggers claim that MEK has not been involved in a terrorist attack in years. Joshua Keating at FP: The idea that a group blamed for the killing of six Americans in the 1970s, as well as dozens of deadly terrorist bombings against Iranian targets afte,r that is “the largest peaceful, secular, pro-democratic Iranian dissident group”...
Just in case you are not yet convinced that the Obama administration's counterterrorism policies are actually worse than the Bush administration's: The officials said U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had made the decision to remove MEK from the list, and that it was expected to be formally announced in coming days. The State Department said that Clinton sent a classified communication...
A few weeks ago, I wrote a long post explaining the one way in which the absence of due process in a national prosecution could make a case admissible before the ICC. The post drew a distinction between two different kinds of national prosecutions: (1) one that fails to satisfy international standards of due process; and (2) one that fails...
Just another day in America's own gulag: A special Obama administration task force review found in 2009 that Latif, who had been held at Gitmo since early 2002 and had waged a long legal battle for his freedom, could be released, a conclusion that could only be reached by a unanimous vote of all U.S. intelligence agencies. That finding was buttressed a...
Mark Kersten has the scoop at Justice in Conflict: So why, then, did Mauritania do it or, perhaps more accurately, how did Libya convince Mauritania to change its tune? Having reached out to various contacts to see whether anyone knew what had changed Mauritania’s mind, a number of individuals quickly responded that there was only one possible motivation: money. While certainly not...
My colleague Mark Movsesian has a post at the St. John's Center for Law and Religion Forum concerning the case of Ramil Safarov. He begins: At a NATO conference in Hungary in 2004, an Azeri officer, Ramil Safarov, murdered one of the other participants, an Armenian officer named Gurgen Margaryan. Actually, that doesn’t quite capture it. Safarov broke into Margaryan’s room,...
Just when you thought you've seen everything -- you haven't: According to a statement posted on the website of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Judge El Hadji Malik Sow, a Senegalese jurist who served as alternate judge for Trial Chamber II, has agreed to testify in the wake of the defense appeal. A guilty verdict was handed down against Taylor last...
What I said last month, about Mauritania refusing to extradite al-Senussi to Libya? Never mind: The man accused of having helped orchestrate some of the worst crimes committed by the regime of ex-Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has been extradited back to Libya, according to a Mauritanian government statement. The communique carried by national radio and on Mauritania's official news agency said Abdullah...
A recent post at Mother Jones mentions my view of UBL's killing and provides Ken's brief thoughts on his death: Kenneth Anderson, a law professor at American University Washington School of Law, disagrees. "Being wounded does not necessarily render one hors de combat; hors de combat means they’re not actually posing a threat to you," Anderson says, citing moments where wounded...
Of the 1500+ posts I've written for Opinio Juris over the past seven years, none angered my fellow progressives more than the post in which I claimed that the killing of Usama bin Laden was perfectly legal under international law. Here is what I wrote: To begin with, I think the applicable legal regime is international humanitarian law (IHL), not international...
A friend of mine asked me that question the other day. Imagine that a non-state actor (NSA) had both a legislative branch that enacted criminal laws and a functioning criminal-justice system that prosecuted violations of those laws. Could the NSA challenge the admissibility of a case pending at the ICC on the ground that it was already investigating or prosecuting...
For the love of God, is it really too much to ask for reporters to do five minutes of research before they write about international law? See if you can spot the mistake in this article about Britain's silly threat to invade the Ecuadorian embassy to arrest Julian Assange: Ecuador has said it may appeal to the International Criminal Court (ICC)...
