A couple of months ago, the ICTY Appeals Chamber acquitted Momčilo Perišić, the Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army, of aiding and abetting various international crimes committed by the Army of Republika Srpska (VRS) during the war in the Balkans. According to the Appeals Chamber, when a defendant is accused of aiding and abetting crimes committed by an organization,...
By any standard, the Pre-Trial Chamber's rejection of Libya's admissibility challenge is a crushing defeat for the Libyan government. Libya's challenge failed for two basic reasons: (1) Libya is not investigating the same case as the OTP; and (2) Libya is currently unable to genuinely prosecute Saif. I will address the first ground, which I think is legally correct but...
Bloomberg reports very disturbing statements made by a spokesperson for the Free Syrian Army: Communities inhabited by Shiite Muslims and President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority will be “wiped off the map” if the strategic city of Al-Qusair in central Syria falls to government troops, rebel forces said. “We don’t want this to happen, but it will be a reality imposed on everyone,”...
There is a classic jury instruction that reads, "[a] witness who is willfully false in one material part of his or her testimony is to be distrusted in others. You may reject the whole testimony of a witness who willfully has testified falsely as to a material point, unless, from all the evidence, you believe the probability of truth favors his...
I want to call readers' attention to a new -- and very original -- article written by one of my best Melbourne students, Ilana Singer, which has just been published in Criminal Law Forum. Here is the abstract of the article, which is rather wordily entitled "Reductio Ad Absurdum: The Kapo Trial Judgements' Contribution to International Criminal Law Jurisprudence and Customary International...
Last December, the U.S. Senate failed to give consent to U.S. ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Since the election hasn't really changed the composition of the Senate all that much, I kind of thought this treaty was dead, or at least dormant, for a while here in the U.S. Maybe not! Groups opposed to...
As Bill Schabas noted in his recent post, the Comoros referral raises interesting questions concerning the Pre-Trial Chamber's power to review a decision by the OTP not to open a full investigation into a situation. Most people who don't keep a copy of the Rome Statute in their back pocket probably believe that the OTP has complete discretion concerning such...
In my previous post, I expressed my skepticism that the OTP will open a formal investigation into the situation -- loosely defined -- involving Israel's attack on the MV Mavi Marmara. In this post, I want to raise two issues concerning Comoros' referral that I find particularly troubling. First, why is Comoros being represented by Turkish lawyers, the Elmadag Law Firm...
This is very interesting. The Union of the Comoros, a state party to the Rome Statute since 2002, has formally referred Israel's attack on the flotilla that included the MV Mavi Marmara to the ICC. The question I want to address in this post is whether the Court has jurisdiction over the flotilla attack. I think it's clear that it does...
The ICC's website is its public face. Scholars, activists, and interested laypeople -- many who live in the situations under investigation -- rely on it as their primary source of information about the Court's activities. So it is imperative that the Court update its website in a timely fashion. Time and again, however, it does not. Case in point: three new...
The Kenyan government has asked the Security Council to pass a resolution deferring the prosecution of Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto, the newly-elected President and Deputy President of Kenya. That's not surprising; the Kenyan government has been doing everything in its power to undermine the ICC. What is surprising, though, is that Ruto has explicitly disavowed the request: Through lawyer Karim Khan, Ruto...
This according to the Commission of Inquiry on Syria, which has considerable investigative ability. Reuters: (Reuters) - U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday. The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen...
