At least according to Dominic Hughes, a BBC reporter who obviously can't be bothered to know what he's talking about: Perhaps not surprisingly Radovan Karadzic has been a reluctant participant in this trial. The former leader of the Bosnian Serbs has appeared just a few times, regularly boycotting the process. Apparently, "once" now qualifies as "regularly." Good job, BBC! ADDENDUM: Hughes also claims that...
Both Humblelawstudent and Stuart Taylor have criticized my previous post. Both misunderstand the federal torture statute and the concept of torture in important -- and unfortunately all too common -- ways, so it is worth explaining their errors in a separate post. Let's begin with HLS. He claims that, contrary to my assertion, "the statute requires the interrogator to actually...
David Luban and Stuart Taylor are having an interesting exchange at Balkinization over whether the CIA's use of waterboarding qualifies as torture under the federal torture statute, 18 USC 2340. Luban accuses Taylor of embracing "the fundamental trick used by the torture lawyers: pretending that the legal definition of 'torture' is something technical rather than 'colloquial'," when...
The following is a guest-post -- actually a short book-proposal -- by my friend Mark Osiel, the Aliber Family Chair in Law at the University of Iowa. I have agreed to post it despite the inordinate jealousy I feel toward his remarkable productivity. Mark would greatly appreciate comments and criticisms, especially examples and counter-examples of what he is trying to...
Sure, it's in Roman Polanski's new film, The Ghost Writer. But it's still cool -- especially when the Prime Minister, played by an excellent Pierce Brosnan, is charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity for aiding and abetting torture by the United States! I have to admit, I never thought I'd live to see Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute...
I am sitting in the Indianapolis airport as I write this, heading home from a conference on the Milosevic trial. The conference was easily the most enjoyable I've ever attended -- I vastly prefer small, specialized conferences to mega-events like the AALS or ASIL. The attendees were a superb mix of academics, former OTP investigators and analysts, and defence attorneys. ...
After five years, the U.S. Department of Justice has finally released its report of its internal investigation into the legal advice provided by its attorneys that became known as the "Torture Memos." The lead investigator was the Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) which issued a report recommending referring John Yoo and Jay Bybee to their state bars for disciplinary proceedings....
What a shock: the Appeals Chamber has upheld Richard Harvey's appointment as stand-by counsel. I would engage in a detailed account of its reasoning, but the short decision -- 16 pages, only five of which are analysis -- provides none. Here, for example, is the AC's response to the heart of Dr. Karadzic's challenge, the irrationality of the procedures the...
Dapo Akande, who seems to know more about head of state immunity than anyone else, has an interesting post on the recent ICC Appeals Chamber non-decision decision in the case against Sudan's President Bashir. He points out that the Appeals Chamber failed to even mention the question of head of state immunity, which is important in this case because as...
That's the allegation made by Dr. Karin N. Calvo-Goller, a senior lecturer at the Academic Center of Law & Business in Israel, against Joseph H.H. Weiler, a professor at NYU who is the Editor-in-Chief of the marvelous European Journal of International Law. In 2007, globallawbooks.org (GLB), a book-review website associated with EJIL that Professor Weiler also edits, published a negative...
I intend to closely follow the reactions to the Appeals Chamber's decision on the genocide charges against Bashir. The pushback has already begun in a predictable place: the Making Sense of Darfur blog, which has led the charge against the arrest warrant. The post itself, in which David Barsoum asks "what is the ICC really after in Sudan?", is not...
As I predicted, the Appeals Chamber has rejected the Pre-Trial Chamber's interpretation of the "reasonable grounds" standard: Appeals judges said the court was wrong to conclude in March that there was insufficient evidence to merit charging al-Bashir with three genocide counts. Instead, it had charged him with seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for allegedly...
