That's the excellent question asked by Ian, one of the commenters on Roger's recent post. The New York Times, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, Le Monde, and El Pais -- all are just as guilty of violating the Espionage Act as WikiLeaks. There is no "we redacted some of the documents" defense in the Act, and prosecuting a news organization after...
This is how real conservatives roll -- not the faux American kind, who believe that waterboarding is wrong only when someone else is doing it: It is not yet clear whether George W Bush is planning to cross the Atlantic to flog us his memoirs, but if I were his PR people I would urge caution. As ...
I don't have time to respond to the Ghailani verdict, which Julian notes below. I would simply direct readers to Ben Wittes' superb post at Lawfare, in which he criticizes those who view the verdict as a vindication of the military commissions. Here's a snippet: Second, it really is not clear that prosecutors would have fared better in a military...
While doing research for an essay on sentencing and the rights of defendants in international criminal law -- my contribution to the international law/Islamic law conference to which I'm now heading -- I stumbled across an exceptional essay by Shahram Dama, a professor at John Marshall Law School. Here is the abstract: Although ranking among the most fundamental principles of criminal...
I understand the rationale behind the Obama Administration's policy of engagement with the U.N. Human Rights Council. So I understand why U.S. delegates subjected themselves to sharp and sometimes ridiculous criticism by other states during a session yesterday on United States human rights practices. A delegation of top officials, led by Assistant Secretary of State Esther Brimmer, gave diplomats at the...
A couple of weeks ago, New Stream Dream accused me of never believing individuals who -- like Khadr and Lynne Stewart -- confess to committing crimes. Well, I believe this confession: In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about...
The following is a guest post by David Glazier, an Associate Professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. As Opinio Juris readers likely recall, there are two ongoing federal prosecutions in Norfolk, Virginia before different judges of Somali pirates who made the boneheaded mistakes of attempting attacks on two separate U.S. Navy warships. (Hey, it was dark!) In the first...
At least the war criminal lost: The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons. Pantano ordered the two men to search the car...
I have bumped Dave's comment to the main page, because it's worth a read -- and not just because it supports my claim that Khadr will serve no more than two years in a Canadian prison...
One of the most significant questions under GATT Article XX is whether States can violate WTO rules in order to protect against foreign harms. It is an issue that has plagued the GATT/WTO for almost twenty years, most famously in the Tuna-Dolphin and US--Shrimp cases. If, for example, Article XX(b) allows departures from WTO rules "to protect human,...
This according to AP: The sentence was handed down Sunday under a plea bargain in which the young Canadian admitted to five war crimes charges, including killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Under the deal, the judge was limited to the eight-year sentence and had to ignore the recommendation of a military jury that Khadr serve 40...
Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing. Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...
