Sometimes, countries really act in ways that don't appear motivated by narrow material self-interest. Australia's recent campaign to win a Security Council referral against Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe is a good example of this type of moralist foreign policy. Australia has no obvious national interests at stake in Southern Africa. It stands pretty much alone in...
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has praised the issuance of the ICC arrest warrants for top Ugandan LRA rebels. He noted that "the ICC only intends to prosecute those LRA senior leaders who are alleged to bear the greatest responsibility for the most serious crimes. He therefore urges all eligible LRA combatants to take advantage of existing disarmament and reintegration programmes."...
Ian Fishback's open letter to Senator John McCain cried out for clear rules on detainee interrogation. He wrote: "For 17 months, I tried to determine what specific standards governed the treatment of detainees by consulting my chain of command ...
Sometimes being virtuous pays off. The Thomas J. Dodd Prize in International Justice and Human Rights has been awarded jointly to Justice Richard Goldstone and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour. The two well-known figures from the human rights community will share the prize of $75,000. Thomas Dodd, the father of current U.S. Senator from Connecticut Chris Dodd,...
October 16, 2002: "Iraqi officials say President Saddam Hussein has won 100% backing in a referendum on whether he should rule for another seven years. There were 11,445,638 eligible voters-and every one of them voted for the president, according to Izzat Ibrahim, Vice-Chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council." (Link) October 16, 2005: "I voted then, for Saddam,...
The ICC Prosecutor has unsealed the arrest warrants issued in July 2005 against five leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The warrants can be found here. Not surprisingly, these warrants allege pretty grisly crimes including:murder, abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation, as well as mass burnings of houses and looting of camp settlements ...
Speaking of Grotius, a Dutch court ruled this week that it would not extradite an alleged Al Qaeda suspect to the U.S. because his fundamental legal rights could not be guaranteed. The Court held, according to AP: “[t]he risk that the [individual] will be confronted with suspicions of involvement in the al Qaeda network is certainly not imaginary. … This...
Hugo Grotius, the Founding Father of international law, wrote in On the Laws of War and Peace (1625) that "So far from any thing in the principles of nature being repugnant to war, every part of them indeed rather favours it. For the preservation of our lives and persons, which is the end of war … is most suitable to...
In another sign of China's arrival as major world power, China's space program successfully put two Chinese "taikonauts" into orbit Wednesday using their Shenzhou VI rockets. The state-run People's Daily newspaper has set up a website for tracking the progress of the taikonauts here. This is yet another boost to China's self-confidence (the 2008 Olympics in Beijing is another) and...
Percy Bysshe Shelly said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. If that’s true (and even if it's not), then we need to consider why Harold Pinter has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Think of this as being another way to assess the mood of our European allies and perhaps world opinion more generally.As Peggy and Roger...
The Contracting States to the European Convention are obligated to "hold free elections at reasonable intervals by secret ballot, under conditions which will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature.” An English statute dating back to 1870 provides that: "A convicted person during the time that he is detained in a...
The story coming out of Uganda bears emphasis for its impact on the ICC doctrine of complementarity. Under Article 17 of the Rome Statute, “the Court shall determine that a case is inadmissible where … [t]he case is being investigated or prosecuted by a State which has jurisdiction over it, unless the State is unwilling or unable genuinely to...
