Last May, I offered some critical thoughts on Opinio Juris about Charles Taylor's 50-year sentence at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. I have just finished a short essay (8,000 words) on Taylor's sentence that will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of International Criminal Justice; you can find the essay on SSRN. Here is the introduction: On 30 May...
The OTP has weighed in on Libya's ongoing challenge to the admissibility of the case against Saif Gaddafi. In its view, although there are serious questions concerning whether Libya is investigating the same conduct as the OTP, Libya is currently willing and able to conduct a genuine prosecution. Unfortunately, its conclusion regarding ability rests on a very serious legal error....
According to the White Paper (p. 6), a US citizen "who is located outside the United States and is an operational leader continually planning attacks against US persons or interests" cannot lawfully be killed unless, inter alia, "an informed, high-level official of the US government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of attack against the United States." Early...
There is much to say about the DoJ White Paper on the targeted killing of US citizens, which reflects the US's idiosyncratic interpretation of international law. In this post I want to focus on the White Paper's primary -- and in my view fatal -- flaw: its complete failure to address the relationship between the organized armed groups that it...
Here's a gem from Libya's latest submission in its challenge to the admissibility of the case against al-Senussi (emphasis mine): The Libyan Government observes that there has been a recent increase in filings in this case, no doubt due to the retention of new counsel for Mr Al-Senussi. Libya of course understands that counsel for Mr Al-Senussi will rightly want to...
We know what is stake at in Libya's admissibility challenge regarding Saif Gaddafi: either a fair trial at the ICC that will likely result in a lengthy prison sentence or an unfair trial in Libya that will almost certainly result in execution. Libya has done nothing to disguise the unfairness of its national proceedings, but it has generally pretended to...
Libya has filed a lengthy response to a series of Pre-Trial Chamber questions about the domestic proceedings against Saif. There is much of interest in the motion, but what particularly caught my eye is Libya's open admission that it has repeatedly interrogated Saif and confronted him with witnesses in the absence of defence counsel. Here are the relevant paragraphs (emphasis...
I've been catching up on the lastest filings regarding Libya's complementarity challenges, and I'll have a post tomorrow about some shocking admissions by Libya concerning its planned domestic prosecution of Saif Gaddafi. But I would be remiss if I didn't point out now that Libya is denying -- in writing, but apparently with a straight face -- that it paid...
Nothing in the Human Right's Council's report is particularly novel; it's long been obvious that both the settlements and the transfer of Israeli civilians into the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal. Nevertheless, it's worth noting the report's most important conclusions: 100. The facts brought to the attention of the Mission indicate that the State of Israel has had full control of...
Michael Lewis claims, in his very interesting post, that "it is fair to say that if Israel’s action in the 1967 war was justified by Article 51 (something that most states, if not most scholars, seem to agree with), then Article 51 'imminence' is broader than Caroline 'imminence'." I don't have time today to address that claim in any detail, but I...
McClatchy reports that Israel now believes Iran will not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until 2015 or 2016. That is progress of a sort; Netanyahu had previously been claiming that Iran would have the bomb no later than late summer 2013 -- around six months from now. But Israel is still insisting that Iran is only two or...
David Bosco has an important post at The Multilateralist today reminding people that Palestine does not have to ratify the Rome Statute for the ICC to be able to investigate the situation in the West Bank and Gaza. As David notes, because Palestine has filed a declaration under Article 12(3) accepting the Court's jurisdiction on an ad hoc basis, the...
