In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Organizations

04 Mar

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...

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03 Mar

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...

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23 Feb

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...

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22 Feb

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. ...

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16 Feb

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...

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11 Feb

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...

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03 Feb

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...

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29 Jan

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...

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29 Jan

As we get closer to the review conference on the ICC, many of us have been watching, and perhaps commenting on, ways in which the US might or might not take part as an observer.  It seems certain that the US will be an observer at the review conference, and the primary issue on the table for the conference is the crime of aggression.  My own view of this is that the whole effort is a mistake - essentially for the reasons that Michael Glennon lays out in his fine new Yale International Law Journal article, The Blank Prose Crime of Aggression.  However, as I remark at the end of this post, whatever one's prescriptive views, descriptively the effort appears to raise questions about "contracting around" the Security Council in a changing world but un-amendable UN.
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13 Jan

The Trial Chamber has granted certification to appeal its decision upholding the Registry's selection of Richard Harvey as stand-by counsel. Here are the relevant paragraphs: 10. With regard to the first limb that must be met before certification to appeal can be granted under Rule 73(B) of the Rules, the Chamber notes that the Decision Denying Motion to Vacate concerned the...

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30 Dec

Last year, as I was reading an early draft of the agenda for the ICC's Review Conference in 2010, I asked myself what I would change about the Rome Statute if I was King of the Assembly of States Parties.  My answer was that I would amend Article 17, the complementarity provision, to make a case admissible if a national...

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24 Dec

The Trial Chamber has -- completely unsurprisingly -- rejected Dr. Karadzic's motion challenging Richard Harvey's appointment as stand-by counsel.  As I explained in a previous post, that challenge was based on three grounds: (1) Harvey's appointment violates Article 21(4) of the ICTY Statute, which provides that a defendant has the right “to communicate with counsel of his own choosing” and...

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