In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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26 Sep

The Sudanese government has proven endlessly creative at resisting genuine progress toward peace, but I don't think this strategy is going to do it much good:The Sudanese government has begun filing a defamation lawsuit against Amnesty International for a report on torture against political prisoners in the country, the justice minister said Wednesday. The London-based rights group said in statement last...

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25 Sep

U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney has joined a growing public movement to "indict" Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for incitement to commit genocide against Israelis. In his letter to the U.N. Secretary General from last week (and developed more here), Romney writes, If President Ahmadinejad sets foot in the United States, he should be handed an indictment under the Genocide Convention....

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25 Sep

I have had two wonderful days at Princeton's Center for Theological Inquiry with Jeremy Waldron, Mary Ellen O'Connell, Nicholas Grief and noted theologians discussing the intersection between theology and international law. One of the topics that came up was whether international law is teleological. My strong assumption is yes. Albert Schweitzer in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture talks about...

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25 Sep

Local actors are having a foreign policy field day lately. Yesterday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger accepted an invitation from the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and addressed the U.N. General Assembly. You can watch the Governor’s speech here (or read a transcript here). Schwarzenegger’s speech focused on what California is doing about climate change. Emphasizing that...

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24 Sep

The U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, created by last year's Military Commissions Act of 2006, has issued a ruling reversing a lower military commission judge who refused to assert jurisdiction over Gitmo detainees charged by the U.S. I don't have any time right now to analyze this, but here is the decision, United States v. Khadr, hot off...

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24 Sep

Kudos to the State Department for launching the Digital Outreach Team, a.k.a. the Foggy Bottom Bloggers. As reported here, they are doing marvelous work spreading the message of tolerance and dialogue to Middle East blogs frequented by radical Muslims. The team concentrates on about a dozen mainstream Web sites such as chat rooms set up by the BBC and Al...

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24 Sep

For those of you not blessed (or cursed) to live in the New York area, you may not have noticed the chorus of local outrage over Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's request to visit "Ground Zero", the site of the former World Trade Center in New York during his attendance at the U.N. General Assembly opening session next month. I actually...

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24 Sep

Now you too can become a micro-lender to the working poor with Kiva. I just learned about Kiva this past week and I find it just incredible. As the websites describes it, "Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a...

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23 Sep

The Guardian (UK) has a fascinating article today about opposition within the ICTY to the UN's purported intention to replace the chief ICTY prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, with Serge Brammertz, a deputy prosecutor at the ICC and the head of the UN commission investigating the murder of Lebanase Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. According to the article, the ICTY's...

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22 Sep

As part of its completion strategy, the ICTR intends to transfer 41 cases to national jurisdictions. Most of the transfers will be to Rwanda, which recently eliminated the death penalty. The ICTR has already requested four such transfers: Ildephonse Hategekimana, Gaspard Kanyarukiga, Yussuf Munyakazi, and Fulgence Kayishema. The ICTR's efforts to transfer cases to other national jurisdictions, however, have...

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22 Sep

Chapman lawprof John Hall has a curious op-ed in the WSJ (subscription required) attacking the Cambodia hybrid war crimes court. He calls it "another U.N. corruption scandal in the making." But this is really unfair to the U.N. (and when was the last time I wrote that sentence, maybe never?) Professor Hall is really arguing that the problem with...

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