El Universal -- along with other newspapers -- is reporting that one of President Uribe's final acts in office was to file a complaint with the ICC alleging that Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, is responsible for permitting FARC guerrillas to use Venezuela as a staging area for crimes committed in Colombia: Jaime Granados, the lawyer of Colombian outgoing president...
I've argued for the past couple of years that the ICC should open a formal investigation into the situation in Colombia, because it is a non-African situation that satisfies most, if not all, of my criteria for situational gravity: (1) crimes committed with government involvement; (2) systematic criminality; (3) socially alarming crimes such as enforced disappearance and torture. Here is...
Not surprisingly, the AU has condemned the ICC's decision to issue an arrest warrant against Bashir for genocide. Equally unsurprising, the new resolution seems to have been adopted with the same kind of back-room machinations that led to the AU's previous resolution condemning the ICC: Over the weekend, delegates from the AU countries reportedly fought a fierce battle that led...
[The following is a guest-post by Lt. Col. Chris Jenks, the Chief of the International Law Branch in the Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General. He is blogging in his personal capacity.] The day ICC supporters and detractors alike hoped would come, albeit for very different reasons, arrived on Wednesday, July 21st -- Sudanese President Omar Bashir publicly...
Two items worth noting. First, as Julian pointed out the other day, Moreno-Ocampo's refusal to comply with the Trial Chamber's order to disclose the identity of an intermediary to Lubanga's defense team has led the Trial Chamber to order Lubanga's release pending appeal. (The OTP filed the appeal today). It is bad enough that the "independent statutory obligation" to protect...
Greg McNeal has passed along the sad news that Charles Gittings, a long-time commenter on Opinio Juris, has passed away at an untimely 57. Here is a snippet from his obituary in the Los Angeles Times: Though not a lawyer, Gittings had a life-long interest in military tactics and law that led him to become an invaluable resource to some...
As I predicted, the Pre-Trial Chamber has approved genocide charges for Bashir: The International Criminal Court has issued a second arrest warrant for Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir - this time for charges of genocide. He already faces charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, which he denies. The ICC first indicted him in March 2009 but he has not...
As I noted in my previous post, the OTP argued that it had an "independent statutory obligation" to protect witnesses that permitted it to ignore the Trial Chamber's order to reveal the intermediary's identity to the defense. The Trial Chamber rejected that claim, and rightfully so. There is no such obligation -- or, perhaps more precisely, there is no such...
I don't make that claim lightly. Despite my belief that Moreno-Ocampo has been a disaster as a prosecutor, I have consistently opposed calls for his removal, whether because of his retaliation against an employee for accusing him of sexual harassment or because he decided to pursue genocide charges against Bashir. I even opposed his ouster when his misuse of confidentiality...
I discovered the error this morning, as I was re-reading the Appeals Chamber decision for the joint criminal enterprise section of my book on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. The decision cites Einsatzgruppen as an example of JCE I, "basic" joint criminal enterprise, and then attributes the following quote to the Einsatzgruppen tribunal (para. 200): the elementary principle must be borne in...
Not according to Yaacov Lozowick, an Israeli historian: Here's my input, on a point no-one else seems to be noticing: There was no Nazi invasion of the Sudetenland, no invasion of Slovakia, hardly one of Austria and even less of Bohemia. Nazi Germany brutally invaded many countries, but those weren't among them. Go check the history books and...
Dapo Akande has an important post today at EJIL: Talk! that asks, as he puts it, "what exactly was agreed in Kampala on the crime of aggression?" I think this paragraph is particularly important: The opt out provision is the most confusing aspect of the aggression amendments. Who exactly is required to opt out? Once the requisite number of...
