The UN Security Council has passed unanimously a US drafted resolution authorizing attacks upon pirates, whether by land or sea. It is one of those rare security issues in which the great powers, and many small ones, have been willing to come together, at least in granting authority. As the Washington Post reports: The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Tuesday to authorize nations...
Just in time for Christmas too. Of course, it was not really him. Rather, it was Judge José Luis Jesus, the newly elected president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). President Jesus addressed the UN General Assembly on December 5, 2008, and met separately with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon a day earlier. Although these annual speeches traditionally provide...
Scott Malcomson, an editor on foreign affairs at the New York Times Magazine, as well as being one of the Really Smart People I Know, had a short, interesting review in the NYT book review, on Sunday, December 14, 2008 of books on humanitarianism and intervention, "When To Intervene." Scott blogs over at HuffPo, but for this book review especially,...
My friend (and OJ alum) Marko Milanovic has a superb post today on the new EJIL: Talk! about the strengths and weaknesses of the Genocide Convention. Here is a taste: Before we ask ourselves whether the Convention does what it was supposed to do, we need to look at what it actually says. And it says very, very little. The definition...
A number of readers have e-mailed to ask why, given my interest in all things ICTY, I have not said anything about the Karadzic case. The answer is relatively simple: I have been serving for the past two months as one of Dr. Karadzic's primary legal advisers, which raises a number of complicated issues vis-a-vis blogging. On the one hand,...
International Anti-Corruption Day is sanctioned by the UN as a day to increase awareness of corruption and its effects upon governance and public life. I realize that today's events in Chicago raise the possibilities of some heavy-handed irony - but actually, I'm pleased in a quite un-ironic way. If one has to have the phenomenon of this day for this,...
Douglas Burgess, Jr., has an editorial in today's New York Times arguing that piracy should be considered terrorism in order to facilitate its prosecution. It's an interesting piece, but I have to take issue with the basic premise of his argument: Are pirates a species of terrorist? In short, yes. The same definition of pirates as hostis humani generis could also...
An association of 15 human-rights groups, including Human Rights Watch, Human Rights First, and the Save Darfur Coalition, released a devastating report today on the Sudanese government's cynical -- and mendacious -- PR campaign to convince the international community that it is committed to bringing peace to Darfur. Here is a snippet of the executive summary: This report focuses on four...
The Institute for War & Peace Reporting has a must-read article today about how ordinary Darfuris view the OTP's decision to seek arrest warrants for the rebel leaders allegedly responsible for killing 12 peacekeepers in 2007. According to the article -- and all the usual caveats about anecdotal evidence apply -- the response is uniformly negative: Yasir, an IDP (internally displaced...
Violence in Kenya following the disputed 2007 elections left more than 1,300 people dead and more than 500,000 internally displaced. Last month, Kenya's Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence released a 527-page report -- the Waki Report -- that concluded much of the violence was planned and organized by members of Kenya's security agencies, business leaders, politicians, and government officials. ...
(Professor Martin Scheinin, whose mission and report on the US and counterterrorism and human rights I discussed below, was kind enough to post a substantive response to my earlier post, "Try or Release." Particularly since I was quite critical of that report, let me move Professor's Scheinin's response up to its own post. Apologies for not noticing it earlier -...
Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has been criticized by some as being invisible, at least compared with his rock-star predecessor, Kofi Annan. However, he has emerged as UN frontman for a new campaign from the UN for a plan for a simultaneous global jobs and economic recovery program together with green program. The SG's program is outlined in op-ed form...
