Our friends at the University of Amsterdam's Center for International Law have asked us to announce the European Science Foundation's upcoming conference, The Responsibility to Protect: From Principle to Practice. Here is the description of the conference, which sounds like it's well worth attending: Five years after its acceptance by the 2005 World Summit, it is time to consider the...
Here is another persuasive account of why the U.S. is disadvantaged by not joining the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. The case is fairly simple: There is a lot of oil and natural gas up there, and the U.S. can't negotiate with other countries to divvy it up until it signs on to UNCLOS. The 5.5 million-square-mile area...
Yesterday, the Japanese Government (now led by the Democratic Party after nearly five-plus decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party) confirmed that in the 1960s Japan and the United States entered into a series of secret defense pacts. Specifically, a committee of scholars has identified various tacit agreements allowing U.S. warships to carry nuclear weapons into Japanese ports, granting unrestricted use of...
Last fall, the U.S. joined Egypt in a carefully worded statement in favor of free expression, but it raised concerns that the U.S. was implicitly endorsing the movement in many Islamic countries to ban blasphemous (or anti-Islamic) speech. In an otherwise anodyne address to the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs...
I am delighted to announce that Luis Moreno-Ocampo has appointed my friend and colleague Tim McCormack to be the Office of the Prosecutor's Special Adviser on International Humanitarian Law. From the announcement: Professor McCormack, from the Melbourne Law School at the University of Melbourne will help the Office of the Prosecutor to develop a solid understanding of complex legal issues such...
The following is a guest-post -- actually a short book-proposal -- by my friend Mark Osiel, the Aliber Family Chair in Law at the University of Iowa. I have agreed to post it despite the inordinate jealousy I feel toward his remarkable productivity. Mark would greatly appreciate comments and criticisms, especially examples and counter-examples of what he is trying to...
I am sitting in the Indianapolis airport as I write this, heading home from a conference on the Milosevic trial. The conference was easily the most enjoyable I've ever attended -- I vastly prefer small, specialized conferences to mega-events like the AALS or ASIL. The attendees were a superb mix of academics, former OTP investigators and analysts, and defence attorneys. ...
What a shock: the Appeals Chamber has upheld Richard Harvey's appointment as stand-by counsel. I would engage in a detailed account of its reasoning, but the short decision -- 16 pages, only five of which are analysis -- provides none. Here, for example, is the AC's response to the heart of Dr. Karadzic's challenge, the irrationality of the procedures the...
The UN's new temporary quarters, during renovations, are not too popular with the staff. For the next four years, the United Nations' nerve center, including Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's office, will be situated in a squat, three-story, corrugated steel building on the U.N.'s north lawn that looks like a cross between a suburban big-box store and a high-security lockup facility. Bantánamo, a nickname embraced...
I intend to closely follow the reactions to the Appeals Chamber's decision on the genocide charges against Bashir. The pushback has already begun in a predictable place: the Making Sense of Darfur blog, which has led the charge against the arrest warrant. The post itself, in which David Barsoum asks "what is the ICC really after in Sudan?", is not...
I want to offer two thoughts on Glennon's article, which -- though I am generally skeptical of the ICC's attempts to define the crime -- I find anything but convincing. The first has to do with his central thesis: that the Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression's proposed definition of aggression "would constitute a crime in blank prose...
