In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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17 May

A story that has been getting a bit of play in Europe but not as much on this side of the Atlantic is the dispute over the placement of a war memorial in Estonia. In April the Estonian government removed from its capital a memorial to Soviet soldiers who fought in WW II. Estonia’s ethnic Russian minority—and Russia—were...

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17 May

We had a ballot question in Philadelphia "urg[ing] the United States to make year 2007 the time to redeploy U.S. troops out of harm's way in Iraq," through the unusual mechanism of an amendment to the city's Home Rule Charter. The measure passed overwhelmingly (122,710 to 49,938). According to the Institute for Policy Studies (which has long promoted...

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17 May

Extremely disturbing news out of Rwanda: a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group has been arrested after being accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide by a local gacaca court:Francois-Xavier Byuma, vice-president of the board of the Rwandan League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights ["Turengere Abana"], was detained last week in Kigali and taken Wednesday to...

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16 May

There is an amazing story posted over at Harvard Law School's Global Voices about how park rangers in the Congo are partnering with elementary school children in Colorado Springs, Colorado to raise money and awareness to protect endangered gorillas from poachers. The rangers blog about their experiences and the children sell pickles (50 cents each) as part of their...

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15 May

Excellent news for historians researching the Holocaust: the 11-nation governing body of the International Tracing Service, which oversees a massive archive of Nazi documents in Bad Arolsen, Germany, has voted to begin distributing the documents electronically to member states:The archive contains Nazi records on the arrest, transportation, incarceration, forced labor and deaths of millions of people from the year the...

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15 May

Richard Posner has an interesting but unconvincing post asking the question why there have been no violent, disruptive protests against the war in Iraq, as there were in 1968 over the Vietnam War. He suggests that in addition to "[t]he obvious answer that there is no longer a draft", that there are five contributing factors that explain the absence...

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15 May

There is a thoughtful piece in the New Republic by David Fontana, Alex Massie, and Oliver Kamm on the legacy of Tony Blair. I think it adds some real insights on Blair's contributions that were neglected in my previous post. Here is a key excerpt: What, exactly, is Tony Blair's legacy? With Iraq at the center of the news,...

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15 May

It’s been a very quiet term for the Senate on treaties. But that may be about to change. The Washington Note is reporting that President Bush will soon publicly announce his support for Senate advice and consent to U.S. accession to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the follow-on Implementation Agreement, which...

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