Last week, I discussed the disturbing case of Francois Xavier-Byuma, a senior official with a Rwandan human-rights group who had been arrested and accused of complicity in the 1994 genocide. As I noted in that post, the accusations were leveled by a gacaca judge whom Byuma had been investigating in connection with the rape of a young girl. The situation...
The United Nations announced last week that the government of Burundi has agreed to establish a criminal tribunal and truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) to deal with the widespread war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide committed during Burundi's 12-year civil war, in which more than 300,000 people were killed:Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights,...
The Economic Mobility Project has released a fascinating and disturbing report entitled "Economic Mobility: Is the American Dream Alive and Well?" The entire report is well worth a read, but what I found particularly striking was how poorly the U.S. does in terms of economic mobility relative to other developed Western countries, particularly the much-maligned ones in Scandinavia: The report...
On behalf of the regular contributors here at Opinio Juris, I wanted to welcome (and introduce) our first two interns who will be helping out around here (in the virtual sense) over the summer. Brianne Draffin is a rising 3L at Case Western Reserve School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio where she is the Symposium Editor of the Journal...
The Council on Foreign Relations has launched Campaign 2008, which is "engineered to track the campaign through the prism of foreign policy, trade, international economics, and national and homeland security issues...
Interesting exchange kicked off by Einer Elhauge over at VC (here), with responses from Larry Tribe, Jack Balkin, and Orin Kerr (here, here, and here), among others, the basic line of which is that doctrinalism will get you nowhere in the legal academy these days. The disagreement has been mostly about what qualifies as doctrinalism, and whether this isn't...
Yesterday, the International Court of Justice issued a preliminary judgment analyzing some interesting issues about the ability of a state to exercise diplomatic protection on behalf of a hybrid partnership/corporation registered under the laws of another state. The case surrounds Zaire's (the predecessor state to the DRC's) 1995 expulsion of Mr. Ahmadou Sadio Diallo, a Guinea citizen who had...
Pretty tough question, eh? The answer: both of their recent books on the US and international law post-9/11 have been remaindered — that is, they have been deeply discounted from their list prices (see here and here). What does this say about the reading public? No ideological explanations available, since they come at it from opposite perspectives....
Carmen Cisneros and Michael Aragon were married in 1987, when Cisneros was 15 and Aragon was 19. They were married for 13 years. Following their divorce, Cisneros (a Mexican national) filed suit against Aragon for statutory rape. But rather than rely simply on domestic law, Cisneros includes a claim for a violation of international law under the...
While we are on the topic of Nazis, a more contemporary story: recently discovered documents have reignited controversy in the Netherlands over whether KLM played an active role in helping Nazi war criminals flee Europe at the end of WW II.KLM, Royal Dutch Airlines, has always denied that it had a policy of assisting Nazis to escape justice at the...
You see it in nearly every movie about WW II: one the one side, you have the evil Nazi fanatics, Hitler and Goering and the like; on the other side, you have Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, a gifted tank commander far removed from the genocidal machinations at Wannsee. Think Patton. As it turns out, the truth is a bit...
The NY Times fronts this interesting piece today on the rising number of Mexican consulates in the US — now up to 47, with recent additions including cities not traditionally hosting large consular communities, like Little Rock, Raleigh, and St Paul. But that's where Mexican immigrants are going, and the Mexican government is following. The consulates provide a...
