In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Human Rights Law

03 May

William Ranney Levi's paper on interrogation techniques, Interrogation's Law, is forthcoming in Yale Law Journal, but is up at SSRN.  Here is the abstract: Conventional wisdom states that recent U.S. authorization of coercive interrogation techniques, and the legal decisions that sanctioned them, constitute a dramatic break with the past. This is false. U.S. interrogation policy well prior to 9/11 has allowed...

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02 May

So I'm not exactly surprised that Obama is planning to revive the use of military commissions to try terror suspects, (according to the NYT).  The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Mr. Obama himself. No doubt there will be some amendment to the Bush commissions,...

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29 Apr

The Eleventh Circuit earlier this month ruled that Manuel Noriega could be extradited to France following the completion of his sentence in Florida. In Noriega v. Pastrana, Noriega argued that under the Third Geneva Convention he was entitled to automatic and immediate repatriation to Panama as soon as his criminal sentence was complete. However, Section 5 of the...

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27 Apr

The National Court has reassigned the case from Judge Garzon to Judge Eloy Velasco.  CNN says that "Judge Velasco is thought to have little, if any, experience in these kinds of cases."  Apparently, CNN has never heard of The Google, because it took me about 30 seconds to learn that, in January, Judge Velasco relied on Spain's universal jurisdiction law...

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26 Apr

Despite his checkered past, I'm beginning to like Jacob Zuma, who is set to become the next President of South Africa, more and more: The Sudanese president Omer Hassan Al-Bashir will not be invited to the inauguration ceremony of the South African president-elect Jacob Zuma, according to news reports. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) headed by Zuma has an absolute majority...

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25 Apr

State Department Legal Adviser nominee Harold Koh's written answers to pre-hearing questions asked by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have been posted online at Senator Lugar's site.  The Q&A goes for over 60 pages. I have only skimmed it and so, for now, I will simply point out questions/answers that may be of particular interest to Opinio Juris readers (and of course, I...

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24 Apr

And proves he is neither very funny nor even remotely interested in anything resembling intelligent debate: Hypothesize that the Obama administration, or perhaps foreign/international courts, prosecute and convict various officials of the Bush administration. Further assume that the new President who takes office in 2013 or 2017 has promised "I will ensure that the crimes of the previous administration are vigorously...

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24 Apr

Harold Koh, who is moderating the last Reisman panel on human rights, asks the panel about the legal status of human rights committees like the CEDAW committee, obliquely referring to a controversy over the legal status of such committees' interpretive authority. Hmm...

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21 Apr

TNR discusses here the circumstances of last Friday's intervention by Palestinian doctor Ashraf El Hagog as a representative of UN Watch.  The Chair of the then-Prep Com, who has since been elected chair of the Durban II conference, is Najjat al-Hajjaji, representing the government of Libya. Readers might recall that Hagog, along with a group of Bulgarian nurses was...

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