The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia has just held that JCE III, otherwise known as "extended" joint criminal enterprise, did not exist under customary international law during 1975-1979, the period over which the ECCC has temporal jurisdiction. The decision is a stunning rebuke to the ICTY, which invented -- literally out of thin air -- that form of...
As the smear campaign against Richard Goldstone gets ever more desperate, it seems opportune to provide a bit more information about Israel's support for apartheid, to which Goldstone's pales in comparison. Here is Sasha Polokow-Suransky again, this time responding to attacks on Goldstone by the Speaker of the Knesset and Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister: Goldstone's apartheid-era judicial rulings are undoubtedly a...
The New York Times is reporting that Moreno-Ocampo has offered Spain's Judge Garzon a temporary position as one of his advisors: Spain’s well-known investigating magistrate, Baltasar Garzón who is being prosecuted in a case filed by far-right Spanish groups, has been offered a temporary post as an external adviser to the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in...
Michael Kearney at the University of York has written a long and interesting response to Julian's post, which I have posted below to make sure people see it. I'm far from expert about the law of statehood, so I'm reluctant to comment on the international-law debate. I continue to believe, though, that accepting the Palestinian declaration would be disastrous for...
Julian entitled a post last week "The ICC Begins to Fade in Importance in Sudan." Julian might want to have a talk with Bashir about that: On the international summit circuit, no one can clear a room more quickly than Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. Leaders have maneuvered to stay out of photographs with him, dashed ...
David Bernstein calls me out today for "blogging not a word" about The New Republic's recent attack on Human Rights Watch's coverage of Israel. He also claims that "HRW has not responded" and that "it’s almost as if 'headquarters' has sent out word to ignore the TNR piece in the hopes it will go away." I'll oblige Bernstein with a...
Whoops, spoke too soon about the WSJ's anti-ICC editorial. It does indeed contain a lie -- and its a doozy: What’s more, no amount of reform of the founding treaty will change the ICC’s inherent flaw. The ICC is a child of the doctrine of “universal jurisdiction,” which holds that courts can adjudicate crimes committed anywhere in the...
When I teach International Trade, one of my favorite parts of the class is the discussion of trade linkages. How does a state balance competing concerns such as labor, the environment, and human rights? Typically the WTO accommodates those concerns through the General Exceptions that permit a state to violate the WTO rules if doing so is, say,...
Julian beat me to the punch regarding the new Council on Foreign Relations report, From Rome to Kampala: The U.S. Approach to the 2010 International Criminal Court Review Conference. Not surprisingly, I don't share Julian's enthusiasm for it. On the contrary, I think it's extremely disappointing, little more than a reiteration of the same tired talking points that the...
A federal district court in Texas has held that the Alien Tort Statute ("ATS") requires allegations of intent to violate international law. The mere knowledge that such violation was occurring, or would occur, is insufficient to support a claim under the ATS. The complaint in Abecassis v. Wyatt alleges that various corporations and individuals purchased oil from Iraq and made...
I don't know a lot about CEDAW, the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, but I know that lots of groups on both sides think the treaty is really important. For instance, in this post, a critic of CEDAW quotes a proponent of CEDAW, Janet Benshoof, for the view that: "[W]ere the United States (US) to ratify CEDAW, it would bring...
"An ancient gold tablet, discovered during archaeological excavations in 1913 in the Ottoman Empire, disappeared from a Berlin museum in the immediate aftermath of World War II and reappeared almost sixty years later in the safe deposit box of a Holocaust survivor." So begins In re Flamenbaum, a case that reads like a Hollywood movie script. As reported here, "the...
