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...
I want to offer two thoughts on Glennon's article, which -- though I am generally skeptical of the ICC's attempts to define the crime -- I find anything but convincing. The first has to do with his central thesis: that the Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression's proposed definition of aggression "would constitute a crime in blank prose...
The Trial Chamber has granted certification to appeal its decision upholding the Registry's selection of Richard Harvey as stand-by counsel. Here are the relevant paragraphs: 10. With regard to the first limb that must be met before certification to appeal can be granted under Rule 73(B) of the Rules, the Chamber notes that the Decision Denying Motion to Vacate concerned the...
I've been writing Chapter 3 of my book on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, which traces the evolution of the Office of the Chief of Counsel's trial program -- how it selected the twelve cases, why it abandoned others, which suspects it included and which it excluded. It's a fun chapter to write, both because no one has ever done it...
My friend and IntLawGrrl contributor Beth van Schaack has asked me to post the following call for papers: Call for Papers: Women & International Criminal Law Special Issue of the International Criminal Law Review Dedicated to Judge Patricia M. Wald The International Criminal Law Review invites submissions for its 2010 special issue entitled "Women and International Criminal Law," to be guest-edited by...
Last year, as I was reading an early draft of the agenda for the ICC's Review Conference in 2010, I asked myself what I would change about the Rome Statute if I was King of the Assembly of States Parties. My answer was that I would amend Article 17, the complementarity provision, to make a case admissible if a national...
The Trial Chamber has -- completely unsurprisingly -- rejected Dr. Karadzic's motion challenging Richard Harvey's appointment as stand-by counsel. As I explained in a previous post, that challenge was based on three grounds: (1) Harvey's appointment violates Article 21(4) of the ICTY Statute, which provides that a defendant has the right “to communicate with counsel of his own choosing” and...
