This past month I received an email sent to over 60 law professors inviting us to join an amicus brief. The case is before the D.C. Circuit and involves the important issue of corporate responsibility for human rights violations under international law. The email was sent at approximately midnight on a Monday night and invited a distinguished group...
Two months ago, I predicted that the Security Council would not have the votes necessary to defer the ICC's prosecution of Bashir. Nostradamus I'm not: In a last-ditch attempt to prevent ICC judges from issuing an arrest warrant for Bashir in the next few weeks, Bashir's supporters - the Arab League, the African Union, China and Russia - will use the...
I had the pleasure this past Friday to moderate a conference at Pepperdine on social entrepreneurship that featured Matt Flannery, co-founder of Kiva, one of the leading microfinance organizations on the Internet. There is so much I could say about Kiva and Flannery's remarks, but let me just highlight a few points that were raised by his discussion. First, the...
Opinio Juris is pleased to welcome Daniel Seidemann as a guest blogger this week to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the future of Jerusalem. Daniel is the founder and legal advisor for Ir Amim, a non-profit, non-partisan association dedicated to an equitable, stable and sustainable Jerusalem. Ir Amim (“City of Nations” or “City of Peoples”) was founded in...
In this final substantive post of my Warholian week as guest blogger I offer a necessarily telegraphic summary of my long chapter on the conflict. Being telegraphic it will not even have the virtue of the chapter, i.e. even if it is clearly wrong, it won’t be wrong clearly. For two reasons I devoted an entire chapter to a single neuralgic...
Kristen’s last post concludes by opening the giant can of worms at the heart of international human rights law: “Farer’s analogy [between recent U.S. counterterrorism measures and Latin American practices in the 1980’s] shows weaknesses in the [human rights] compliance system generally…. [B]ecause it remains an issue of domestic competence as to whether human rights are enforced in the face...
There’s so much domestic news these days it would’ve been easy to miss Eric Lichtblau’s story in yesterday’s New York Times about legislation introduced in Congress just before the August recess that would substantially define the scope of the United States’ war with Al Qaeda, et al. Indeed, it’s not clear why the Times itself finally just realized the significance...
My blogging has slowed down the past couple of weeks, because I've been traveling and finishing a book chapter that criticizes Moreno-Ocampo's approach to deciding which situations to investigate. (See my previous post.) But I would be remiss if I did not mention this interesting piece of news -- the Fifth Circuit has reversed the district court's dismissal of the...
The Guardian seems to think so: A coalition of human rights lawyers, academics and leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs) has begun openly to criticise the competence and conduct of the prosecutor of the international criminal court, the Argentinian Luis Moreno-Ocampo. Their concerns follow his announcement last month that it is to seek an arrest warrant for genocide against the Sudanese president, and...
The blog Futurismic as an interesting post on "viral sovereignty." According to a recent Washington Post op-ed by Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett: This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations — even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat...
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about my experiences in Georgia in the early 1990s, monitoring the various conflicts - Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and the then-Georgian civil war in Tbilisi. I noted that those secessionist conflicts were marked on each side by ethnic cleansing as extreme as anything I saw in the Yugloslav wars (a country which I also...
I know politics makes strange bedfellows, but this is ridiculous: Two unlikely allies met for breakfast last month in New York to discuss a possible collaboration: Mia Farrow, actress and passionate activist for Darfur refugees, and Erik Prince, founder and CEO of the government contractor, Blackwater Worldwide. Farrow told ABC News that Blackwater, despite its controversial history and allegations of murdering civilians...
