According to SwissInfo, the United Nations is upset with Switzerland for amending its Code pénal militaire suisse to restrict the country’s ability to prosecute war crimes committed abroad. Article 2 of the Swiss Military Penal Code provides that military tribunals have jurisdiction over civilians or members of foreign forces who commit violations of international law during armed conflict. ...
The official languages of the ICTR are English and French. The vast majority of the 1,500 witnesses who have testified before the tribunal, however, speak only Kinyarawanda, the African-Bantu language that is the most widely-spoken language in Rwanda. As the Hirondelle News Agency reports in a fascinating article, the fact that most of the testimony heard by the...
Two of America's leading scholars of foreign relations law, John Yoo and Jack Goldsmith, are co-hosting a day-long conference on Tuesday, February 21 at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C (see here for registration details). The conference, entitled the "The Outsourcing of American Law" will feature Justice Antonin Scalia as the keynote speaker (gee, what do you think he...
Thad Anderson of outragedmoderates.org (and a St John’s Law student) has posted documents released under a Freedom of Information Act request he had made which include notes of DoD staffer Steven Cambone from meetings with Donald Rumsfeld on the afternoon and evening of September 11, 2001. Cambone’s notes were cited by the 9/11 Commission and by CBS.Anderson explains:The released notes...
In a decision bound to upset the US government and most Americans, an Italian appellate court has upheld a lower court's acquittal of three North African men accused of recruiting suicide bombers to attack US soldiers in Iraq. The men had been charged with international terrorism, a crime adopted in Italy following 9/11. The appellate court ruled that, in the...
I have solicited the thoughts of Prof. Geoffrey Corn, a law of war expert and former guest blogger at Opinio Juris, on the latest Abu Ghraib photos. Here's his take on the release of the new photos:On Wednesday, a new batch of Abu Ghraib photographs hit the press. The world is once again reminded of the “shocking and awful” abuse...
IBM Research is doing some amazing work on protecting the intellectual property of Internet images through watermarks. The purpose of the watermark is to provide a secondary image which is overlaid translucently on the primary image that can be used to protect intellectual property or to provide authentication and validation of images. For example, this top image has embedded within...
Robert McMahon at the Council on Foreign Relations has a nice primer on Chinese efforts to curtail political speech. The post includes a discussion of how China does it, what role U.S. firms play in the process, how important the Internet is to China, whether Congress is planning any action, and technological efforts to bypass the censorship through proxy servers....
This and other very interesting questions are being discussed over at the Grotian Moments. (By the way, the answer appears to be yes, as long as certain guidelines are followed)....
Canada appears to have lost a round in the never-ending dispute over U.S. duties on softwood lumber. A WTO panel has ruled that U.S. duties do not violate WTO obligations. Canada's view, of course, is that the U.S. duties do violate WTO obligations, in part because they also violate NAFTA obligations. Essentially, the U.S. has consistently lost in...
After a few days of selective leaking drafts of their report to major news outlets, the Special Rapporteurs of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights have finally released their report on the situation in Guantanamo Bay.As I suggested earlier, the report sounds impressive, but it doesn't add a whole lot to the existing debate. It provides no new facts or...
The Washington Post is reporting that the United States is prepared to spend $75 million to promote democracy in Iran. According to the report, "the United States hopes to capitalize on the 'disturbing trend of Iranian diplomacy' since Ahmadinejad's election, including the refusal to continue negotiations on the nuclear program...
