The ICC held a hearing for Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, its first arrestee, today. He has a provisional defence counsel and will get a full hearing in June. According to the BBC, Lubanga is a rebel warlord leading a group battling rivals from the Lendu ethnic group, partly for control of large deposits of gold in the Democratic Republic of...
Voice of America reports that an Afghan man, Abdul Rahman, is facing the death penalty for converting to Christianity from Islam, a capital offense under Afghanistan's Islamic law. The case points to an fundamental tension in the new Afghan constitution. On the one hand, the constitution declares Afghanistan an "Islamic Republic" (Ch. 1, Art. 2) and prohibits...
There is a nice article in the New Republic on the memory of Milosevic by a former member of the ICTY prosecution team, Mark Vlasic. Here is an excerpt:There will be no mention today of Slobodan Lazarevic, the Serbian spy who testified that Milosevic used the war in Croatia as a way to divert Serbian attention from dissatisfaction over...
Behold the new face of the anti-war movement. Sure, she's pretty. And I'm completely on board with the "no war" sentiment. But why does she have — as Josh Marshall astutely points out — a Mercedes-Benz symbol on the other side of her face? Have the hippies been so soon forgotten? Or is she trying...
Read this article about Iranian women seeking gender equality in its simplest terms: at the football pitch. "The battle is for equal gender rights and opportunities, from all-encompassing issues to smaller ones such as the right to watch matches in a football stadium." When the women organized a campaign to watch the football match, they were escorted onto a bus,...
Kevin's post on the Iraqi-Al Qaeda relationship suggests that there is little evidence of a colloborative relationship in the recently released Iraq files. This might or might not be true, but (because Opinio Juris is fair and balanced), we should also consider evidence from those files showing Saddam's Iraq had connections with, and perhaps plans to work with,...
Here's a story you don't see every day:NAVY EXCHANGES FIRE WITH SUSPECTED PIRATES DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Two U.S. Navy warships exchanged gunfire with suspected pirates Saturday off the coast of Somalia, and one suspect was killed and five others were wounded, the navy said. Twelve suspects were taken into custody after the early-morning shootout, said Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown, spokesman...
"Corporations, unlike states, are voluntary contractual associations...
One of the Bush administration's central justifications for invading Iraq was the supposed "collaborative relationship" between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The link, according to the administration, was Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist responsible for some of the bloodiest attacks in Iraq, from the bombing of the UN's headquarters to the beheading of Nicholas Berg. Recall Colin Powell's...
The ICC has reached another milestone -- it now has its first indictee in custody: Mr Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese national and alleged founder and leader of the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC) was arrested and transferred to the International Criminal Court as part of the judicial proceedings under the Rome Statute (the “Statute”). Thomas Lubanga is alleged to have...
In the first Tribunal decision to deal with the actions of Mujahedin soldiers in central Bosnia and Herzegovina, the ICTY Trial Chamber II has found two former Bosnian Muslim army commanders, General Enver Hadzihasanovic and Brigadier Amir Kubura, guilty of war crimes committed against Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb civilians during the 1992-95 war. Both men were convicted...
There is an interesting Pew Research poll published this week regarding the public's attitude regarding foreign investment, free trade, and the Dubai ports deal. While discussing the survey results, I want to weave comments from Richard Posner and Gary Becker into the discussion because I find their take to be an intellectual articulation of what appears to be...
