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)...
As I noted last week, I have just finished a long chapter critically assessing the work of the Human Rights Council-created International Commission of Inquiry on Libya (COI). My basic conclusion is that although the COI generally did an excellent job, particularly in terms of its fact-finding methodology, it seems clear that it was less interested in holding the rebels...
I am delighted to report that Oxford has just published my friend Sandy Sivakumaran's massive tome, The Law of Non-International Armed Conflict. Here is the publisher's description: This book brings together and critically analyses the disparate conventional, customary, and soft law relating to non-international armed conflict. All the relevant bodies of international law are considered, including international humanitarian law, international criminal...
I honestly believed that the Libyan government couldn't make a public claim more ridiculous than the one about the Swatch with a hidden camera and GPS locator. Silly me for my lack of imagination! Mark Kersten, whose Justice in Conflict blog should be prominently featured in your newsreader, called my attention to this recent gem from the prosecutor in charge...
For you, dear reader, I risked life and limb to obtain the schematics of the video/GPS Swatch that the OPCD's interpreter used to undermine Libya's national security. After assuming deep cover, prowling some of the world's most dangerous locales, and making contact with too many shadowy characters to count, I finally succeeded. Here it is -- look at your own...
At Justice in Conflict, Mark Kersten calls attention to a recent motion filed by the Libyan government asking for more time -- read: stalling -- to reply to the OPCD's response to its admissibility challenge. The government doesn't actually want a deadline to respond; it would like to have 18 days from whenever it gets around to appointing a new...
