In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Human Rights Law

07 Jul

Thanks to Opinio Juris for inviting me to comment on Foreign Official Immunity Determinations in U.S. Courts: The Case Against the State Department, Professor Ingrid Wuerth’s timely and insightful article. The springboard for the article is Samantar v. Yousuf, the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision which held that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) does not apply to individual government...

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07 Jul

We now know that there is broad agreement that if Texas Governor Perry goes forward with today's scheduled execution of Humberto Leal, he will be doing so in violation of law.  Who has said so?  Well, the U.S. government, the U.S. Supreme Court, at least three concurring judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, a significant number of members...

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06 Jul

Cross posted at Balkinization Big news in the past day is the Obama administration’s announcement that a Somali national captured by the U.S. military somewhere in the Gulf has been transferred to New York for federal prosecution on terrorism-related charges.  According to the Justice Department (DOJ), the man, Warsame, was “questioned for intelligence purposes for more than two months” after his...

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06 Jul

I'm under the pump because of a deadline, but I wanted to call readers' attention to a short editorial at OpenDemocracy.net written by Victor Kattan about the PLO/PA's intention to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize Palestinian statehood in September.  Victor discusses a variety of interesting diplomatic and legal aspects of that intention, including the possibility that the PLO/PA...

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02 Jul

Humberto Leal is scheduled for execution in Texas on July 7th. A Mexican national, Leal was not notified of his right to consular assistance under the Vienna Convention of Consular Relations. In light of the International Court of Justice's decision in the Avena case (Mexico v. U.S.), Congress is currently working on legislation to bring the U.S. into compliance with its international...

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27 Jun

I am delighted to announce the publication of my book "The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law."  The book can be ordered from Oxford University Press here; Amazon should have it (at a whopping $8.78 discount) in the next few days.  Here for the last time is the cover: Once again, I want to thank...

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24 Jun

Earlier today, the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review (CMCR) held in U.S. v. Hamdan that material support for terrorism is a war crime and thus within the jurisdiction of the military commissions.  The decision represents the apotheosis of the US's utterly self-referential approach to international law, because the CMCR managed to reach that conclusion without citing a single non-American...

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21 Jun

Apologies for the light blogging the past couple of weeks -- although the upside is that I am now officially Dr. Heller, having successfully defended my dissertation at Leiden University in the Netherlands a few days ago.  It was an amazing (and amazingly formal) experience, and I'll blog about it once I get the official photos from the university. I've been...

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26 May

In Serbia, not surprisingly: Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general accused of overseeing the worst massacre in Europe since the end of World War II, has been arrested, Serbian authorities said Thursday. Mladic is Europe's most wanted war crimes suspect for his alleged role in the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica,...

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25 May

Members of Falun Gong have filed suit against Cisco, alleging the company collaborated with the Chinese government to develop and maintain “Golden Shield” technology. As a result of this technology, Falun Gong members have allegedly suffered “severe and gross abuses, including false imprisonment, torture, cruel assault, battery, and wrongful death.” The complaint, filed by my former colleague Lee Boyd and...

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24 May

According to TPM Muckraker, the DOJ has authorized prosecutors to indict John Edwards.  So in case you were wondering about the Obama administration's priorities, here they are: violating election laws to cover up an affair, not acceptable.  Ordering torture, no problem. Glad we cleared that up....

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