A district court in the Hague has sentenced Gus Kouwenhoven to eight years in prison for smuggling weapons for Charles Taylor in violation of a UN arms embargo. In their ruling on Wednesday, the judges said Mr. Kouwenhoven's assistance to Mr. Taylor was "crucial," and suggested his motivations were not political, but rather "guided purely by financial interests." ...
Professor Louis B. Sohn died on Wednesday, June 7. He was 92. Professor Sohn was one of the most well-known American (by way of Poland) international lawyers of his generation – over the years, he taught, wrote about, and practiced international law in a wide variety of areas, including human rights, arms control, the environment, and the law of the...
Al Jazeera has some of the most appalling coverage of the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi that one could possibly imagine for a major news network. First, there is the lead story entitled "U.S., allies hail Zarqawi killing" which reports that family members of Zarqawi's beheaded victims had "mixed reactions" to the news of his death. The article concludes with...
The writers at Democracy Arsenal did some live-blogging at Tuesday's conference "Power and Superpower: Global Leadership for the 21st Century," an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress and the Century Institute. While the msm focuses on Mark Malloch Brown's criticisms of US participation at the UN (fueled by "unchecked UN-bashing" in the US), and US Ambassador John...
As the rest of the media is focused on the very good news about the demise of Abu Masub al-Zarqawi (see Andrew Sullivan's round-up of perspectives here, here and here), I wanted to draw attention to an article in today's WSJ describing the ICC's problems with its prosecution of Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army. As Jess Bravin's...
World Cup competition is upon us. Although lost upon the general public, there are in fact complex rules of engagement that are elaborately set forth in FIFA regulations. Here is a brief synopsis of the laws of the World Cup. First, the Laws of the Game i.e., the rules of the pitch. Very little can be said that is not...
I’m wondering whether customary international law really exists anymore. No, I’m not talking about Posner and Goldsmith’s use of rational choice methodology to attack the normative value of customary international law; I’m not looking to quarrel with this blog’s namesake, opinio juris, or its effects on relations between states and other subjects of international law. Rather, my inquiry...
Following up on Julian's post, I think the problem is not fully appreciating the difficulty of justifying extraordinary renditions under international law, regardless of torture. Let's say someone is picked up and rendered to another country for interrogation. If we are not at war, then the full panoply of human rights law, including the ICCPR, to which we...
Fiona de Londras has just posted on SSRN an interesting article on gay rights under the European Convention on Human Rights. You can access the abstract and download the article here. The focus of the brief article is applying ECHR jurisprudence on privacy, family life, and marriage to the Irish context as it relates to gay rights. It...
The Council of Europe issued a blistering report today denouncing the U.S. and certain European countries for cooperating in a "reprehensible network" of detaining suspected terrorists in CIA-run secret prisons. I understand the legal arguments against renditions based on the Convention Against Torture. Plainly, countries cannot torture or send someone to a country that is likely to engage...
A French court in Toulose has held the French state and the state railway company SNCF liable for transporting a Holocaust victim to death camps near the end of the Second World War. As reported here, The tribunal in Toulouse ordered the state and the SNCF to pay a total of €62,000 (£43,000) to the family for their deceased father, and...
I'm not sure what I think about this, but international law commentators David Rivkin and Lee Casey have an article today in the Washington Post laying out the legal case for either Israel or the U.N. Security Council to attack or invade Iran. Here is the crux of their argument: . . .Ahmadinejad's rant [against Israel] features a direct...
