My friend Dapo Akande takes me to task today at EJIL: Talk! for my position on drone strikes directed at combatants attending a funeral or helping the wounded. I will address his curious reluctance to address the text of the Rome Statute in Part II of my response; in this post, I want to address his arguments concerning IHL. Here...
That's the conclusion drawn in this blockbuster report -- which, precisely because it is a blockbuster that makes Israel and the MEK's vast number of Democratic and Republican supporters in the U.S. look bad, has been basically ignored in the "liberal" media: Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed,...
Cross-posted at LieberCode. It is becoming increasingly likely that Russia and China are going to block just about any resolution on Syria coming out of the Security Council, regardless of whether it is meaningful or not. They aren’t going to support a resolution that seriously denounces the regime, nor are they going to support an ICC...
The case involves Luis Moreno-Ocampo's decision to remove Ekkehard Witkopf, then a Senior Trial Lawyer with the OTP, from Lubanga. The following paragraphs from the ILO's judgment best summarize what happened: On 15 December 2008 the Deputy Prosecutor informed the complainant orally that the Executive Committee had decided that he would no longer lead the trial of the Lubanga case on...
[Ingrid Wuerth is Professor of Law at Vanderbilt Law School and Director of Vanderbilt's International Legal Studies Program.] The International Court of Justice has issued its judgment in Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy: Greece Intervening). Germany won, as most observers had predicted. The dispute arose out of a series of decisions by Italian national courts...
It's rare that I defend the ICTY, but I feel compelled to do so here. As discussed in this blog post by Laurie Blank, a group of experts in military law have released a report attacking the Trial Chamber's judgment in Prosecutor v. Gotovina for allegedly misapplying basic IHL rules regarding targeting. Unfortunately, the report fundamentally misstates what the Trial...
The Pre-Trial Chamber II (PTC) has confirmed the charges against 4 of the 6 defendants in the Kenya cases. The following is from the PTC's oral summary of their decision: Summary of Decision in Case 1 I will now turn to the merits of Case 1, the Prosecutor v. William Samoei Ruto, Henry Kiprono Kosgey and Joshua Arap Sang...
It's difficult to accuse these guys of being soft on Tehran, so it's hard to quibble with their conclusion: The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb. The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has...
Gabor Rona posted a response to Jens Ohlin yesterday. Jens responded at LieberCode -- and now Gabor has responded to Jens's response (and John Dehn's comment on his OJ post). Here is what Jens wrote (reposted with permission): Many thanks to Gabor Rona for taking the time to continue this conversation. There’s a lot in Rona’s post, but I want to...
Jens Ohlin has continued the conversation about IHL and IHRL at LieberCode. Here is a snippet, self-servingly chosen because I want to comment on it: It strikes me as curious that human rights activists are so quick to cabin CIL application of the IHL rules of IAC to NIAC. To my ear, it is one of the great advancements...
The following is a guest-post by Gabor Rona, the International Legal Director of Human Rights First. It is a response to a post at LieberCode by Jens Ohlin, a Professor at Cornell Law School, that argues international human rights law (IHRL) does not apply in armed conflict, because it is displaced by international humanitarian law (IHL). Prof. Ohlin’s conclusion that IHRL...
There has been much debate the past couple of days about whether the bomb attacks that have killed at least three Iranian nuclear scientists since 2010 qualify as terrorism. Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum on the left and Andrew Sullivan on the right say "yes"; many of their readers (see Greenwald here) and the editor of Technology Review say "no." ...
