We now know that there is broad agreement that if Texas Governor Perry goes forward with today's scheduled execution of Humberto Leal, he will be doing so in violation of law. Who has said so? Well, the U.S. government, the U.S. Supreme Court, at least three concurring judges on the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, a significant number of members...
I'm under the pump because of a deadline, but I wanted to call readers' attention to a short editorial at OpenDemocracy.net written by Victor Kattan about the PLO/PA's intention to ask the UN General Assembly to recognize Palestinian statehood in September. Victor discusses a variety of interesting diplomatic and legal aspects of that intention, including the possibility that the PLO/PA...
I am delighted to announce the publication of my book "The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law." The book can be ordered from Oxford University Press here; Amazon should have it (at a whopping $8.78 discount) in the next few days. Here for the last time is the cover: Once again, I want to thank...
The D.C. Circuit held this week that torture by non-state actors was not actionable under the Alien Tort Statute. The case, Ali Shafi v. Palestinian Authority, arose from the alleged torture in the West Bank by the Palestinian Authority and the PLO of a Palestinian national who was an Israeli spy. The Shafis argue that “the [Palestinian Authority's] conduct...
I have just posted a new essay -- my first since finishing the NMT book! -- on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Scholars have long debated to what extent the Rome Statute’s principle of complementarity permits states to prosecute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide as ordinary crimes such as rape and murder instead...
In Serbia, not surprisingly: Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb general accused of overseeing the worst massacre in Europe since the end of World War II, has been arrested, Serbian authorities said Thursday. Mladic is Europe's most wanted war crimes suspect for his alleged role in the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the enclave of Srebrenica,...
The following post was written by Luna Droubi. Droubi, who is Syrian American, was Editor in Chief of the New York Law School Law Review from 2010-2011 and received her J.D. this month. As a child, I remember sitting with my grandfather on my grandparent's balcony in Homs, Syria on hot, sticky summer nights. We'd swat away at mosquitoes as...
In his post below, Harold Koh continually refers to the existence of an "armed conflict" between the U.S. and al Qaeda. Koh does not specify what kind of armed conflict the U.S. believes exists, but he references Common Article 3 in the detention section of the ASIL speech that he quotes, indicating that the U.S. believes it is in a...
As discussions over the legality of the May 1 killing of Osama Bin Laden by U.S. forces heated up and international law and law of war experts provided a range of potential arguments for and against the lawfulness of U.S. action, we thought it would help public discussion to present the official U.S. position on the legal dimensions of the...
Many thanks to Duncan for his great post on Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s (DSK) potential immunity, and for inviting me to follow up. My short answer: status-based immunity (often referred to as “diplomatic immunity”) is not available. Conduct-based immunity (also called “official acts” or “functional” immunity) is not available either. Here’s why. The only type of immunity that would benefit DSK would be...
Mark Kersten has a useful post today at his excellent Justice in Conflict blog about what will happen once the OTP announces the results of its investigation of the Libya situation. Check it out!...
The arrest on sexual assault charges of IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Khan (or "DSK" as he's known to the French tabloids) is big news this morning. Most of the main stream media attention (quite naturally) has focused on the salacious allegations themselves and/or DSK's potential presidential ambitions back in France. Here at Opinio Juris, however, I'm sure I was not the...
