Search: kony 2012

This week, Opinio Juris was a bit lighter on the blogging due to the Fourth of July holiday in the US, but we did feature a post from Peggy McGuinness that pointed out a discussion on the St. John’s Center for Law and Religion Forum around the question of whether American foreign policy is Christian, in a conversation Mark Movsesian had with Andrew Preston. Preston is the author of Sword of the Spirit, Shield of the Faith, a book examining the role of faith in US foreign policy...

...has been indicted, by the international criminal court (ICC), has said he will never sign the final agreement unless the indictment is lifted. Look, peace may not be worth giving in to a murderous madman like Kony. And I think Kony may make a deal anyway, but if he doesn’t, the ICC has a tough decision ahead of it. The Ugandan government has pretty much done everything it can to accommodate Kony. But it cannot, repeat, cannot lift the ICC arrest warrants. Only the ICC can do that. Should they?...

pre-dates the adoption of Resolution 67/19, though the General Assembly did not indicate a point in time for Palestine becoming a state. The Prosecutor’s Office at the time erroneously took Resolution 67/19 to mean that Palestine’s statehood dated only from 29 November 2012. That error is not a problem for purposes of the current investigation, as the situations the Prosecutor has in mind to investigate post-date 29 November 2012. Palestine filed a declaration in 2015 under Rome Statute Article 12(3) giving the Court jurisdiction for the Gaza war of Summer...

It looks increasingly likely. Mali has formally self-referred the situation in the country to the ICC and the OTP has already opened a formal preliminary investigation. Here is yesterday’s statement from Fatou Bensouda: Today I received a delegation from the Government of Mali led by the Minister of Justice, H.E. Malick Coulibaly. The delegation transmitted a letter by which the Government of Mali, as a State Party to the ICC, refers “the situation in Mali since January 2012” to my Office and requests an investigation to determine whether one or...

The ICC Office of the Prosecutor has just released the following statement: Palestine is not a State Party to the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the ICC; neither has the Court received any official document from Palestine indicating acceptance of ICC jurisdiction or requesting the Prosecutor to open an investigation into any alleged crimes following the November 2012 United Nations General Assembly Resolution (67/19), which accorded non-member observer State status to Palestine. The ICC has no jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed on the territory of Palestine. I have three...

...children. The persistence of sexual assaults, attacks on schools and hospitals, and recruitment of children into armies is serious. A number of countries have signed “action plans” with the UN to implement the principles in a concrete way. The ICC’s Lubanga judgment of August 2012 reinforced this effort – convicting him of conscription and enlistment of children under 15 for use in active hostilities. Similarly, the decision of the Special Court for Sierra Leone Tribunal in Taylor creates a strong legal framework to prosecute crimes against children. The feisty new...

...negotiations, as indirectly proposed by the ICJ in its 2012 judgment), especially the right to an effective remedy, should not be rendered meaningless, while the victims of past atrocities should –at least– be granted the opportunity to present the merits of their claim. For my own critique to the FR’s arguments and proposals (and on whether it’s possible to overcome the fact that since the 2012 judgment all interested parties should accept that ‘Haga locuta est, causa finita est’ — to paraphrase your own lucid comment on a 2014 relevant...

...apparently envisions a situation in which the Prosecutor wishes to open an investigation into crimes committed in a state that later became party to the Statute, and asks that state whether it would accept the exercise of the Court’s jurisdiction over those earlier crimes. Kony In addition to Laurent Gbagbo and Côte d’Ivoire’s 12(3) declaration, the Pre-Trial Chamber also obliquely touched on both questions in issuing arrest warrants for Kony and his co-defendants. Uganda is a State Party, but the Statute only entered into force for it from 1 September...

...Evangelical surfer bro goes to help kids in Africa. He makes a campy video explaining genocide to the cast of Glee. The world finds his public epiphany to be shallow to the point of self-delusion. The complex geopolitics of central Africa are left undisturbed. Kony’s still there. The end. You see, when inspiration becomes manipulation, inspiration becomes obfuscation. If you are not cynical you should be sceptical. You should be as sceptical of placebo politics as you are placebo medicine. For more on Kony 2012, see our discussion of it,...

...is the specific politics of the Third World state being enacted through the Court, in the same way as the West used the ICC to enacts its political agenda in the situation in Libya. Yet the question of Third World agency is muted here, even as the evidence suggests that the villainization and prosecution of LRA members (and indeed the Kony 2012 campaign Schwöbel-Patel carefully studies in Chapter 6) supports both Museveni’s political interests as well as his economic ones. A tantalizing window into this relationship exists in brief references...

The NYU Journal of International Law and Politics is partnering once again with Opinio Juris for an online symposium. The symposium will correspond with the simultaneous release this week of our Vol. 44, No. 2 issue, featuring a ground-breaking piece by Professor James Hathaway, a world-renowned leader in refugee studies and director of Michigan’s refugee law program, and Jason Pobjoy, a Ph.D. candidate in Law at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge and a visiting doctoral researcher at NYU. The article, Queer Cases Make Bad Law, serves...

...2012. The appeals have not begun. A few other trials are ongoing or set to begin. Even by the low standards of international tribunals, this performance should raise an eyebrow. It occurred to me yesterday that another criminal-justice system recently celebrated its 10th anniversary: the United States military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, which President Bush created by executive order on November 13, 2001. The commission system is vastly less complicated than the ICC — it builds on a long tradition of American military tribunals, it is run solely by one...