Common sense triumphed today when Germany announced it would not investigate allegations that Donald Rumsfeld committed war crimes. The NY-based Center for Constitutional Rights had filed a petition asking Germany to investigate on the theory that the U.S. authorities were incapable of investigating such claims due to a "continuing scheme of corruption". This remarkable (and dare I say it, wild)...
Samantha Power, a tireless Pulitzer-Prize-winning advocate of more aggressive action by the United States to stop genocide and war crimes, offers her take on why the ICC would be more effective than an ad hoc tribunal (a topic we've been batting about here) in today's NYT. Count me as a skeptic of her claim that the ICC will deter war...
The increasing use of empirical research in international legal scholarship is a good thing, as Julian noted. Empiricism (or at least an attempt at empiricism) brushes away the cobwebs of musty “givens” and unpacks old assumptions that have been tucked away. By bringing in new data to test academic doctrines, empiricism can do a good job helping theory be more...
As an addendum to our previous discussion prosecutions and transitional societies (here and here), I note that the New York Times is reporting that the investigating judges of the Iraqi Special Tribunal will refer to the trial charges against Saddam and/or some of his senior aides in the coming weeks. The article gives a good overview of the process to...
Kofi Annan announced yesterday that he has suspended the two senior UN diplomats at the center of the Volcker Commission's Report on misconduct in the Iraq Oil-for-Food Program. The suspension appears to be the first step toward lifting diplomatic immunity, which Annan said he would do if facts support the bringing of criminal charges. Apart from the importance this investigation...
Julian describes the East Timorese decision to have a "Truth and Friendship Commission" as “another country's decision (like South Africa) to avoid 'justice' in favor of 'peace' (some might say 'impunity')." This characterization (at least of South Africa’s Truth Commission) is off the mark. The South African Truth and Reconciliation process did allow for prosecutions; essentially people who did bad...
East Timor announced today that it has reached a tentative agreement with Indonesia to set up a Commission of Truth and Friendship to investigate human rights abuses and crimes committed during Indonesia's occupation of East Timor. While somewhat controversial among human rights groups who sought a Rwanda or Yugoslav-style ad hoc tribunal, the East Timorese foreign minister explained that: We...
Comparing and contrasting the perils and opportunities that international lawyers see in the world with those of non-lawyer foreign policy specialists can be enlightening. At the very least, it can help keep international lawyers from entering into a cul-de-sac where they are more concerned with doctrinal paring than problem solving. In an earlier post, I mentioned a recent article ("What...
Who says President Bush doesn't respect the judgments of international tribunals? While President Bush's "austerity" budget full of sweeping cuts is mostly a domestic story, two of his proposed cuts can be explained as an effort to bring the U.S. into compliance with WTO decisions. First, and more obscurely, the budget calls for eliminating the so-called Byrd Amendment, a provision much...
At first glance, the last thing international law scholarship needs is more theory. Yet, while there is plenty of IL theory, in some ways IL theory is relatively undeveloped. Most importantly, until recently, IL theory was unaffected by the rational-choice juggernaut that swept almost every other discipline, including IL's sister discipline of international relations. But rational choice has arrived with a...
A report published last week by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission paints a bleak picture of the challenges facing post-conflict justice in that country. According to the report, 70 percent of survey respondents said they had been victims of what could be called a crime against humanity. Interestingly, however, only 40 percent of survey respondents favored prosecution of war...
I wanted to return, briefly, to last week's discussion of Darfur. As Julian noted, the UN report concluded that, while crimes against humanity have occurred and should be referred to the ICC, the atrocities do not meet the definition of genocide under international law. Lay observers are scratching their heads over the legal distinction between certain criminal "acts committed with...
