IntLawGrrls

Go On! National courts/intlaw crimes @ Amsterdam

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Sat, 26 May 2012 09:00:00 +0000

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

Amsterdam's historic Trippenhuis, the permanent headquarters of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, will be the site of a conference on a subject about which frequently post, most recently here and here.
The conference, titled Pluralism v. Harmonization: National Adjudication of International Crimes,will be held this June 14 and 15.
Speakers will examine international criminal law "fragmentation at the international and national level," write organizers, including our colleague, Professor Elies van Sliedregt (below right), Dean of the Faculty of Law at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The program promises many distinguished speakers in addition to Elies and her law faculty colleague Barbora Holá; among them, Andrew Cayley, International Co-Prosecutor at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, and Dr. Sarah Nouwen, University Lecturer in Law and Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre and Pembroke College at the University of Cambridge, England.
Topics to be addressed:
► To what extent is harmonizing international criminal law desirable, or even realistic? How does a pluralistic approach contribute?
► How to deal with the tension between collective action and individual responsibility when prosecuting international crimes?
► To what extent does the principle of complementarity as laid down in Article 17 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court require adherence to international standards; does this also affect procedural law, in particular domestic laws of evidence?
► Given fact-finding impediments and evidentiary challenges when dealing with core international crimes, can national courts be of guidance to international criminal tribunals; or vice versa?
Details here; program here.
Register here before the June 4 deadline.

On May 26

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Sat, 26 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...
... 1916, Henriette Roosenburg was born into an upper-class family in the Netherlands. When World War II started she was in graduate school at Leiden University. She joined the Dutch resistance, using the nom de guerre "Zip," and also wrote for a Dutch newspaper. Arrested in 1944 and given the death penalty, she was incarcerated at Waldheim prison in Germany. Released days before V-E Day, she and 4 other former prisoners embarked on a weeks-long journey back to the Netherlands. That sojourn among U.S., Soviet, and other encampments became the basis of Roosenburg's memoir, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1957), at least one edition of which issued with the cover at left. (image credit) A Europe-based writer for Time magazine after the war, Roosenburg died in 1972.

(Prior May 26 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

International authority & the responsibility to protect

noreply@blogger.com (Anne Orford) — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

(Part 2 of a 2-part series; Part 1 is here)

With the end of the Cold War, in which the model of UN executive action outlined in yesterday's post developed, the concept of security, and the ends to which conflict prevention machinery of the United Nations was to be put, became more ambitious:
► Peacekeeping became established as a core technique of international executive action;
► Civilian administration became significantly more ambitious in scope and scale; and
► UN agencies in the humanitarian field began to exercise an increasing range of governmental powers.
With the expansion in the scope and complexity of international operations, it became clear that existing political and legal concepts could not address the questions about legitimacy, authority and credibility to which that expansion gave rise. (photo credit)
Both the achievements and the failures of UN operations during the 1990s placed the legitimacy of international executive action on the table:
► In cases seen as success stories, such as East Timor and Kosovo, local actors challenged the legitimacy of the authority exercised by international administrators, asking why the UN, rather than the people, should have the authority to decide who should govern?
► In cases of failure, such as Rwanda and Srebrenica, critics asked why the UN alone should have the authority to intervene in order to protect populations at risk if other external actors could do so more effectively?
Many of the debates about the legitimacy of international authority came to a head in 1999 when NATO intervened in Kosovo without Security Council authorisation. That intervention challenged not only the authority of sovereign states, but also that of the UN.

Development of responsibility to protect
The development of the responsibility to protect concept can be understood as an attempt to answer these growing questions about the basis of both state and international authority. (Prior IntLawGrrls posts)
Conceptually, the responsibility to protect asserts that the lawfulness of authority – both local and international – flows from the factual capacity and willingness to guarantee protection to the inhabitants of a territory. This argument for the lawfulness of authority does not prioritise self-determination, popular sovereignty, or other romantic or nationalist bases for determining who should have the power to govern in a particular territory. Rather, it asserts that authority, to be recognised and respected, must be effective at guaranteeing protection.
Practically, the implementation of the concept is aimed at strengthening the UN’s capacity to protect. In a series of reports on implementing the responsibility to protect concept, the Secretary-General has stressed that implementation will involve ‘utilizing the whole prevention and protection tool kit available to the United Nations system’, adopting a ‘unifying perspective’ and facilitating ‘system-wide coherence’, and expanding and refocusing the UN’s ‘early warning and assessment capacities’. Implementation of the concept thus involves further consolidating and integrating the techniques of executive action initiated by Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, and discussed in yesterday's post.

Normative significance
What, then, does thinking about the responsibility to protect concept in light of this history suggest about its normative significance?
► First, thinking about the responsibility to protect concept in these terms suggests that it is of normative significance not because it imposes new obligations upon states, but rather because it confers powers ‘of a public or official nature’, and that allocates jurisdiction.
In his 1967 book The Concept of Law, British jurist H.L.A. Hart distinguished between ‘laws that confer powers’ and ‘those that impose duties’. The responsibility to protect concept should be understood as normative in the former sense. The 2005 World Summit Outcome provided the international community, acting through the UN, with a discretionary mandate to take certain forms of executive action in situations where populations need protection.
► Second, understanding the responsibility to protect concept as a form of law that allocates discretionary power to an international executive raises questions about the exercise of that discretion.

To date, the discretionary mandate to undertake executive action in order to further the goal of protecting civilians has been exercised in a selective fashion. It seems almost banal to make the point that the responsibility to protect concept is unlikely ever to be invoked to authorise measures against a major ally of the UN Security Council P5, let alone against a Western European or North American state. (photo credit)
Lawyers within domestic legal systems have long been concerned with issues of whether and how to constrain the broad discretionary powers vested in the executive arm of government. In the most extreme case, a political order that systematically differentiates between its subjects in the application and enforcement of laws may no longer be recognisable as a legal system, and its dictates no longer capable of commanding fidelity or obedience.
► Third, justifying authority on the basis of the capacity to protect raises questions that go to the very heart of politics:

Who decides? Who decides what protection means in a particular time and place, how it can be realised, and which claimant to authority is able to provide it?

Again, the ongoing implications are illustrated by current events in the Middle East, where a number of different political and military projects are being justified in terms of protecting civilians. For much of 2011 in the context of Libya, it was largely NATO – a regional organisation representing the security interests of Western Europe and North America – that effectively exercised the power to make decisions about how protection can be realised in North Africa, and by whom.
► Finally, grounding authority on the capacity to protect has historically tended to privilege certain kinds of institutions and certain forms of action over others.
The turn to protection focuses upon creating institutions that privilege coherence, control, and centralisation. In that respect, authority justified in terms of its capacity to guarantee protection has historically had a tendency to become authoritarian. It might seem extreme to suggest that there could be any relation between the growth of authoritarian security states and the benign ambitions of the responsibility to protect concept. Yet while much attention is currently being paid to building the international capacity to respond to protection challenges through developing more efficient and integrated forms of surveillance and policing mechanisms, there has been much less discussion of the legal limits to international action undertaken to guarantee protection.
We are only now starting to see the emergence of an institutional discussion about the need to set limits on the power of international actors, for example in debates about Brazil’s concept note of November 2011 entitled ‘Responsibility while protecting: elements for the development and promotion of a concept’, to which Patricia O'Brien (left),UN Under-Secretary for Legal Affairs and UN Legal Counsel, referred in a prior IntLawGrrls post.

Conclusion

We seem to have lost the awareness of the radical potential of international executive rule articulated by international lawyers of Hammarskjöld’s generation. Yet it is in those routine practices – of surveillance, prevention, policing, and administration – that the significance of the responsibility to protect concept will be determined.

On May 25

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Fri, 25 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...
... 1997 (15 years ago), in a national referendum, Polish voters approved a new Constitution of the Republic of Poland, which had been adopted by the Sejm and Senate, the lower and upper houses of the National Assembly, in a joint session on April 2. Entering into force on October 17, 1997, the new document replaced a "Small Constitution" that "amended the main articles of the Stalinist constitution of 1952 and formed the legal basis of the Polish State between 1990 and 1997." Still in effect, the 1997 Constitution guarantees many rights to individuals, with special reference to families and children.

(Prior May 25 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Bensouda on Bashir & Bosco (& Barack)

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Thu, 24 May 2012 18:30:00 +0000

A lot of "B"s in one interview playing today at the Beeb.
Interviewed was Fatou Bensouda, who will become Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on July 1.
Karen Allen of the BBC talked with Bensouda on the fringes of a conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Africa and the ICC, a theme on which we've frequently posted, thus was at the core of the interview. (Video, from which above image of Bensouda was made, is available here.)
The name of Bashir of course came up. That would be Omar al-Bashir, who has remained President of Sudan despite the years-old ICC warrant for his arrest. Some countries that belong both to the ICC and the African Union have allowed him safe passage; recently, one of them, Malawi, has reversed course and sought to ban Bashir.
On this, Bensouda said:

'[T]he step that Malawi has taken is very encouraging. We have of course had other African countries that have done similar things. I think Botswana has been very consistent in the position of arresting Bashir if he were to go to Botswana.
'But I also want to make one thing clear. What is out there in the media, mostly, is that African Union is not cooperating with the ICC. And of course there are certain examples why this is said. But I want to say that we have had tremendously good cooperation with individual African states.'

This comment moved conversation to another name, Bosco – Bosco Ntaganda, charged with war crimes when he, like his then-co-accused, Thomas Lubanga, was a Congolese rebel leader. Lubanga awaits ICC sentencing, having been convicted of recruiting child soldiers. Ntaganda managed not just to escape arrest, but also to become a general in the government's army, and so to wield much power. Earlier this month, the ICC added charges against Ntaganda, who reportedly "mutinied" in April and is now forcing children to join his new combat against the government.
On this, Bensouda said:

'[T]hose who have warrants out for them, for their arrest, should be arrested and surrendered to the ICC. This level of "blackmail," which I call it, in which perpetrators are saying that "If you do not drop warrants against me, or if you issue warrants against me, I continue to kill people," I think this is what the international community, especially those who are directly responsible for the arrest of Bosco, should take into account.'

Finally the BBC interview of Bensouda evoked the name Barack – President Barack Obama, who's deployed U.S. troops to Uganda to aid "the removal of Joseph Kony from the battlefield." On this, Bensouda reminded that the ICC relies on states to execute its warrants, including the years-old one for Lord's Resistance Army leader Kony, subject of a NGO-issued viral video, about IntLawGrrls have posted.
On the U.S. role, Bensouda said:

'It is not directly an assistance to the ICC as such, if I may put it that way. It is a request from Uganda, not from the ICC, from Uganda as a state. And also it is a push by Invisible Children on the United States government to do something. ... [T]he Kony 2012 video has done a lot to bring attention to this.'

Asked by the BBC if she thought the United States would ratify the ICC Statute should Obama win re-election this November, Bensouda gave a most politic reply:

'I have refrained from commenting on any state that is not party to the Rome Statute. But I do know that the universality of the court is a good thing for international criminal justice.'

Introducing Anne Orford

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

It's our great pleasure today to welcome as an IntLawGrrls contributor Dr. Anne Orford (left), Michael D. Kirby Professor of International Law and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Melbourne Law School. She also served for many years as the law school's Foundation Director of the Institute for International Law and the Humanities.
We're especially pleased to welcome Anne this week:
Tomorrow, at Sweden's Lund Cathedral, Lund University will give her an honorary doctorate in law

'for her research that releases international law into its full intellectual, political and emancipatory complexity.'

(The other honoree will be Marianne Lundius, President of Sweden's Supreme Court and the 1st woman to hold that position.)
A scholar in many aspects of international law – international trade law, law and development, legal history, legal theory, and post-colonial theory – Anne's been awarded 2 Australian Research Council fellowships, the current one for a 3-year project entitled "From Famine to Food Security: The Role of International Law." She's visited as a teacher or researcher at many universities, among them Lund and Gothenburg in Sweden and Harvard and NYU in the United States. In Germany last month, she presented the Rechtskulturen lecture hosted by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and Humboldt University Law School.
Anne earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Queensland, the Australian state where she's admitted to practice as a solicitor; a master's degree in public international law from the University of London; and a Ph.D. from the University of Adelaide, which also awarded her the Bonython Prize for the best postgraduate law thesis.
Among her many publications is International Authority and the Responsibility to Protect (2011). Anne drew on that work for her presentation at "Military Intervention and the Law of Peace," the plenary panel that opened the March 2012 annual meeting of the American Society of International Law. Patricia O'Brien, the Under-Secretary for Legal Affairs and the U.N. Legal Counsel already has honored us by contributing her remarks at that panel as an IntLawGrrls post. Today Anne does the same. Her introductory post below, as well as her post tomorrow, make up a 2-part exploration of the significance of a concept about which IntLawGrrls frequently have posted, the responsibility to protect.
Anne dedicates her contribution as follows:

'In terms of a transnational foremother, and in the spirit of receiving an honorary doctorate from Sweden, I would like to propose Alva Myrdal – a feminist intellectual who is now treated as one of the major architects of the Swedish welfare state. Myrdal's activism, scholarship, and policy development were based upon a deep-seated conviction that social planning based upon factual knowledge and explicitly articulated values is not only desirable, but also necessary, if the modern state is to be made hospitable for women and children.

'In 1949, at the invitation of the Norwegian Secretary-General Trygve Lie, Myrdal became head of the UN's Department of Social Affairs the highest-placed woman in any international organisation. In that role, she worked on issues including population, human rights, refugees, and the status of women. From 1950 to 1955, Myrdal chaired the Division of Social Sciences at UNESCO. By 1953, Myrdal had begun to voice her concerns that development under UN auspices had become a field for outsiders enforcing American-financed development projects that required large capital outlays and bore little relation to the values and knowledge of local communities.
Myrdal left the UN to serve as Swedish Ambassador to India, Burma, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Nepal from 1955 to 1961. During that period, she became a close friend and political ally of the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
'She is perhaps most famous for her later work on disarmament, as Swedish Ambassador to the Geneva disarmament negotiations, the Swedish Cabinet Minister for Disarmament (1966-1973), and the author of The Game of Disarmament (1976), for which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982.'

Myrdal (photo credit), who died in 1986 in Stockholm, the day after her 84th birthday, joins other inspiring women on IntLawGrrls' foremothers page.

Heartfelt welcome!

Executive action at the United Nations, a basis for the concept of responsibility to protect

noreply@blogger.com (Anne Orford) — Thu, 24 May 2012 09:00:00 +0000

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this introductory post, part of a 2-part series based on a paper that will appear in the 2012 American Society of International Law Annual Meeting Proceedings)

According to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon (right), while the responsibility to protect concept came of age in 2011, the challenge facing the international community remains that of transforming the concept from ‘promise to practice’ or from ‘words into deeds’. In my view, the significance of the concept lies in its capacity to do the reverse – that is, to transform practice into promise, or deeds into words.
More specifically, the responsibility to protect concept offers a framework for rationalising and consolidating practices of international executive rule, many of which were developed by Dag Hammarskjöld (below left), the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, in the early years of decolonisation. (UN photo credits here and here)

Practices of protection: Executive action & the UN Charter

The idea that the UN has a responsibility to protect life in the decolonised world began to take shape with two operations that were undertaken while Hammarskjöld was in office:
► UNEF, the UN Emergency Force in response to the Suez crisis of 1956; and
► ONUC, the UN Operation in the Congo in 1960.
The techniques of executive rule developed under Hammarskjöld’s auspices during those early crises of decolonisation – fact-finding, peacekeeping, strategic forms of technical assistance, and civilian administration – have, of course, since expanded dramatically. Yet as Hammarskjöld recognised, little in the UN Charter suggests its authors envisaged the creation of an international executive that could undertake such wide-ranging forms of action.
In the Introduction to his 1961 Annual Report to the General Assembly (accessible here), Hammarskjöld noted that although ‘great attention is given’ in the UN Charter to elaborating ‘the parliamentary aspects of the Organization, little is said about executive arrangements’. To the extent that there exists an explicit legal basis for these forms of executive action, Hammarskjöld found it in the provisions of the Charter entrusting the Secretary-General with the execution of political decisions at the request of the political organs, and in Article 99, which provides that the Secretary-General

'may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.'

Hammarskjöld (prior IntLawGrrls posts) interpreted these provisions as giving the Secretary-General a position of full political independence and a broad discretionary mandate to engage in fact-finding, preventive diplomacy, and other behind-the-scenes activity necessary to carry out his functions. He thus did not interpret the limited attention in the Charter as a constraint on executive action. Rather, he considered that ‘the executive functions and their form have been left largely to practice’. He argued forcefully that it was necessary to stop thinking of the UN merely as a forum for ‘static conference diplomacy’ and instead reimagine it as a ‘dynamic instrument’ for ‘executive action, undertaken on behalf of all members’. And he emphasised the ‘margin of confidence’ that ‘must be left to those who will carry the responsibility for putting the decisions’ of the political organs ‘into effect’.
International lawyers in the 1950s and ’60s were well aware of the potentially radical effect of this expansion of international executive action. For example, Stephen Schwebel presciently commented in his 1961 book The Origins and Development of Article 99 (p. 382):

'Perhaps it is not too much to suggest that, as the development of the great national civil services profoundly affected the national histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so the growth of the powers of the international executive may in time influence the future course of world affairs.'

Similarly Oscar Schachter, in an American Journal of International Law article written in 1962, soon after Hammarskjöld’s death, suggested that the expansion of ‘executive action’ was ‘widely regarded as constituting a major feature’ of Hammarskjöld’s legacy. Schachter argued that such “‘operational” measures’ were clearly related to international law’, because they created ‘new conceptions of permissible and impermissible interference’ as well as new conceptions ‘of the Charter obligations for mutual assistance and co-operation’.
The radical implications of Hammarskjöld’s expansion of executive action were also not lost on governments at the time. In a confidential memo written to the British Foreign Office after Suez, Sir Pierson Dixon, the British Ambassador to the United Nations, concluded:

'The outcome of this crisis has left the Secretary-General more than a symbol or even an executive: he has become a force.'

(Tomorrow, Part 2 of the series: International authority and the responsibility to protect)

On May 24

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Thu, 24 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...

... 2002 (10 years ago today), at Moscow, in a ceremony featuring Presidents Vladimir Putin, at far left, and George W. Bush, Russia and the United States signed the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. (photo credit) Known as SORT, the weapons control treaty entered into force in 2003 and remained so until 2011, when it was superseded by the New START treaty discussed in prior IntLawGrrls posts.

(Prior May 24 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

New East Asian trilateral investment agreement

noreply@blogger.com (Sadie Blanchard) — Thu, 24 May 2012 00:36:00 +0000

On May 13, China, Japan, and Korea concluded a trilateral investment agreement, promising stronger protection of foreign investment and deepening their commitment to international arbitration for resolving disputes with foreign investors.

The three nations have previously concluded several bilateral investment treaties among themselves, including a 1988 treaty between China and Japan, and a 1992 treaty between China and Korea. However, the rights granted in those agreements were more circumscribed. For example, investors had the right to submit claims to international arbitration only in the case of expropriation and only for a determination of compensation owed under national law (rather than international law). A more recent treaty between Korea and Japan provided stronger investor protections.

Following that lead, the new trilateral treaty establishes all three countries' firm commitment to relinquish national jurisdiction over investment claims by one another's nationals. The treaty may herald a broader shift toward increased integration among the three economies. Trade representatives involved in the treaty negotiations announced that efforts will begin in earnest this year to conclude a free trade agreement. A China-Japan-Korea trade area would be an historic development in international economic law, dwarfing both the NAFTA trading bloc and the EU in population size and surpassing the EU in share of world output, at around a quarter of global GDP.

However, it remains to be seen whether a free trade agreement between the largest East Asian economies is politically feasible—such a treaty would dramatically impact the agricultural sectors of Korea and Japan, which maintain among the world’s heaviest farm subsidies.

(Photo credit: Japan Cabinet Public Relations Office)

Bernaz on capital punishment

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:00:00 +0000

credit

IntLawGrrls contributor Dr. Nadia Bernaz, Senior Lecturer at London's Middlesex University, appeared on "Punishable by death," an Al Jazeera television program that examined global trend toward less use of the death penalty, a trend confounded by an increase in the absolute number of executions.
Watch here.

Searchable version of 2499-page Taylor judgment

noreply@blogger.com (Evelyne Schmid) — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

The April 26 judgment of the Special Court for Sierra Leone in Prosecutor v. Charles Taylor, about which a number of IntLawGrrls have posted, was finally published yesterday: 2499 pages in a non-searchable file of 30MB!
It is the longest judgment of an international tribunal so far.
We academics like searching through files to identify the legal issues of a judgment we are particularly interested in. The defense team would most probably also want to search keywords. So would NGOs who might want to find out what the judgment says about particular geographic locations or specific individuals the NGOs may have worked with. Or journalists. Or people who are simply curious on a particular aspect of the judgment but who cannot read through 2500 pages.
I thought at least we need a searchable file. So I gave it a try and converted the judgment with a text recognition software. It's available here.
It doesn't look nice, of course, and the file contains many mistakes from the conversion and all the formatting is lost, but at least one can search for key terms. Nor does it change anything to the excessive length of the judgment.
But I hope it at least alleviates the challenges a little bit, and allows people to find the parts of the judgment in which they are particularly interested.

On May 23

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Wed, 23 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...
... 1846, a daughter, Belle Aurelia Babb, was born into a farming family in Burlington, Iowa. Having grown up largely without her father present (the California Gold Rush lured him from home) she was graduated from Iowa Wesleyan College in 1865, the Civil War having opened seats for women students. She and her brother placed 1st and 2d, respectively, in that graduating class. Subsequently married to one of her college professors, Arabella Mansfield (right), as she became known, studied for the bar in her brother's law office, took the bar exam notwithstanding a state law barring anyone but white men over 21, and, in 1869, became the 1st woman admitted to the Iowa bar. (photo credit) Though she never practiced law -- becoming a university dean instead -- she belonged to the National League of Women Lawyers. Mansfield also led her state's campaign for women's suffrage. Nearly 70 years after her 1911, she was inducted into the Iowa Women's Hall of Fame; 2 decades after that, an award was established in her name to honor "outstanding women lawyers in Iowa who have promoted and nurtured women in the legal profession."

(Prior May 23 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Gender and Armed Conflict

noreply@blogger.com (Johanna E. Bond) — Wed, 23 May 2012 06:00:00 +0000

I just returned from a conference entitled "Gendering Conflict and Post-Conflict Terrains: New Challenges and Opportunities," which was organized by the University of Minnesota Law School with the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI), Belfast. Fellow Intlawgrrls, Naomi Cahn (George Washington University Law School), Dina Haynes (New England Law), and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin (University of Minnesota and TJI), organized this fantastic conference with the support of ASIL and the Robina Foundation. The full list of participants (including a number of intlawgrrls bloggers) is here.

The conference brought together approximately thirty participants from around the world to discuss emerging issues for women in conflict and post-conflict contexts. The conference opened with remarks from Zohra Rasekh, an elected member of the Committee on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), who discussed the CEDAW Committee's 2010 decision to adopt a general recommendation on women's human rights in conflict and post-conflict settings. The concept note for the general recommendation is available here.

The opening discussion on CEDAW's general recommendation was followed by a number of fascinating presentations, including the value of indicators in measuring women's experiences of harm, the effectiveness of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325 and the National Action Plans that the resolution inspired, the importance of and difficulty in collecting meaningful data on sexual violence in armed conflict, the significance of reparations in the lives of women victims of violence, the limitations of equating women with victims and the corresponding failure to fully explore the role of women as perpetrators and men as victims of armed conflict, the significance of women's representation at the negotiating table, gendered harms and the law of occupation, and the intersection of culture, poverty, and religion and women's rights in armed conflict.

The two-day event also included a poignant and inspiring tribute to Arvonne Fraser, a leading women's rights activist for decades and author of the autobiography, "She's No Lady: Politics, Family and International Feminism." (Listen to her discuss her life and memoir on Minnesota Public Radio here). In addition to being a wonderful mentor and friend to me and many others, Arvonne has dedicated her life to improving women's status around the world. She was the founder and co-Director of the International Women's Rights Action Watch and served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. She continues to inspire us all.

Go On! Human rights & CLE @ ASIL this summer

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Tue, 22 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

The American Society of International Law again will host a summertime continuing legal education series. Cosponsoring is the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at American University Washington College of Law. This year's overall theme is human rights.
All events will take place on Wednesdays, at Tillar House, the ASIL headquarters located at 2223 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C.
This is a great opportunity for anyone based in D.C. this summer – summer interns and summer associates, of course, but also practitioners, given that the course sessions will carry MCLE credits for many jurisdictions. Registration's free and open to ASIL members and nonmembers alike.
Here, as also set out in the series flyer, is the 3-session lineup:
► The Case of Hissène Habré: The Role of International Law and Courts in the Victim's Quest for Justice, May 30, from 12:30 to 2 p.m. (lunch will be served).
Serving as instructor for this session about the long-running, multifaceted effort of human rights groups to bring Chad's former dictator to account (about which we've posted here) will be Reed Brody, Counsel and Spokesperson, Human Rights Watch. Juan E. Méndez, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, will serve as moderator.
Details, registration, and a zip file of course materials available here.
► The U.N. Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions and the Challenges of Monitoring Gross Human Rights Violations, June 6, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. (half-hour reception to follow).
Instructor for this session, on one of the many mandates of the U.N. Human Rights Council, will be Christof Heyns, U.N. Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Moderator will be Elizabeth Andersen, ASIL Executive Director and Executive Vice President.
Details, registration, and a zip file of course materials available here.
► The Future of the International Criminal Court: The Lubanga Judgment and Beyond, June 13, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. (half-hour reception to follow).
Instructor for this session on the March 14, 2012, Trial Chamber judgment in Lubanga (prior IntLawGrrls posts) – the 1st ever for the 10-year-old court – will be ICC Judge Sylvia Steiner (right) and ICTY/ICTR Judge Fausto Pocar. (credit for photo ©ICC-CPI/Jiri Buller) Moderator will be Claudio Grossman, Dean of American University Washington College of Law
Details, registration, and a zip file of course materials available here.

On May 22

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Tue, 22 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...
... 1949, Nancy Putnam Hollister (right) was born in Marietta, an Ohio city across the river from West Virginia. (photo credit) At age 32 Hollister, a Kent State graduate and a Republican, was elected city councilmember. She was mayor of her hometown from 1984 till 1991, when she was appointed director of the Governor's Office of Appalachia, concerned with 29 Ohio countries in that multistate region. Elected lieutenant governor in 1994, she filled a vacancy to become Ohio's only woman governor, for 11 days in December 1998 and January 1999. She lost her last election, for the Ohio state legislature, in 2004 – a defeat attributed to her opposition to a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage.

(Prior May 22 posts here, here, here, here, and here.)

Chávez vs. Inter-American human rights system

noreply@blogger.com (Alexandra Huneeus) — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

The regional human rights system of the Organization of American States is under attack.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, struggling against both cancer and an emboldened opposition, is making a high-profile push for Venezuela to withdraw from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission.
The Presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have joined Chávez in calling for the creation of an alternative regional human rights system sans United States and Canada.
And even the more centrist Latin American leaders are taking shots.
A group of states including Brazil and Peru have asked the OAS to curb the Commission’s power to issue preliminary measures.
President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil temporarily withdrew the country’s envoy to the OAS last year after the Commission called on Brazil to halt work on the massive Belo Monte dam.
President Ollanta Humula of Peru accused the Commission of exceeding its mandate by referring to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights a highly polemical case still stalled in Peru’s courts. He seemingly vowed to defy any future Court order for Peru to punish those responsible for the crimes at issue.
Are these threats serious?
► On the one hand, ire from political leaders is nothing new to the Inter-American system, and arguably even a symptom of its effectiveness. Like muckraking journalists, perhaps human rights bodies are at their best when everyone is mad at them.
Much of the pushback, at any rate, is symbolic politics.
► On the other hand, the threat from Chávez (prior IntLawGrrls posts) may be genuine cause for concern.
Chávez, who seems to be losing his battle against cancer, recently constituted a Council of State, the Venezuelan Consejo de Estado, and announced that its first order of business should be Venezuela’s withdrawal from the Inter-American Commission. (credit for above photo of OAS headquarters in Washington, D.C., where Commission meets; credit for photo below of Inter-American Court headquarters in San José, Costa Rica)
It is not clear what this would mean. As OAS Secretary General Miguel Insulza pointed out, there is no mechanism for withdrawing from the Commission: the Commission was created pursuant to the OAS Charter, so perhaps the only way is to withdraw from the OAS itself.
The Council of State is still studying the matter.
That Venezuela denounced the Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States last January shows that Chávez’s threats are not idle.
More troubling still is that Chávez is a regional trendsetter.
His closer allies, including Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa, Bolivia’s President Evo Morales, and Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega, could try to follow suit. All of them have been targeted by the Commission for their suppression of media freedom of expression, and all have voiced exasperation with a system which, they claim, is unduly influenced by the regional hegemon (that would be the United States, which, though an OAS member, has not given jurisdiction to the Court, and mostly ignores the Commission’s opinions).
Venezuela’s withdrawal would be a serious blow.
As noted in a letter of protest from over 200 concerned academics (among them, IntLawGrrls contributors Caroline Bettinger-López and me, Alexandra Huneeus):

'The "exit" of Venezuela will seriously weaken the mechanisms for the protection of human rights for all Venezuelan men, women, and children, depriving them of an indispensable instrument for their protection.'

Such an exit would also weaken one of the world’s few successful attempts at establishing a regional human rights order.
Latin America has a proud history of regional cooperation towards construction of a human rights regime through the OAS, and it has been a pathbreaker:
► The American Declaration of The Rights and Duties of Man predates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And as Harvard Law Professor Mary Ann Glendon demonstrated in her 2003 article The Forgotten Crucible: The Latin American Influence on the Human Rights Idea, in many ways the American Declaration influenced the later, global one.
► Under the auspices of the OAS, the Commission and Court have forged a body of jurisprudence on abuse of state power to which high courts in countries across the region, along with the European Court of Human Rights, regularly turn as authority.
Supranational institutions are not created overnight. It would be a loss if, in order to advance the political agenda he calls the Bolivarian Revolution, Chávez damages one of the institutions that most closely embodies Simón Bolívar’s vision of Pan-American unity.

On May 21

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Mon, 21 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...
... 2002 (10 years ago today), Niki de Saint Phalle (left) died in La Jolla, California, 71 years after she was born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. (1964 photo credit)
By age 7 she was living in the United States; by age 18 she'd already displayed artistic inclinations and was modeling for Vogue. At her death The New York Times described her as "a Franco-American artist internationally known for her colorful, monumental, cartoonlike sculptures and environments," and a "heroine to feminism before the modern movement even emerged." Among her iconic creations were nanas, balloonish sculptures of voluptuous women. (photo credit) Some may be found in her Tarot Garden in Tuscany.

(Prior May 21 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Sun, 20 May 2012 12:00:00 +0000

'The days of blowing up the relationship over a single guy are over.'

-- No, it's not a nod of agreement between 2 BFFs.
The sentence comes from an unnamed official quoted in a recent New York Times story, "Behind Twists of Diplomacy in the Case of a Chinese Dissident." Steven Lee Myers and Mark Landler quoted a number of such officials in reporting how diplomats from the United States and China managed to work through this month's unexpected arrival, at the former's embassy in the latter's country, of Chen Guangcheng (below right), a Chinese lawyer-activist who'd escaped from house arrest. (photo credit) Yesterday, Chen and his family flew from Beijing to Newark. Outside his new home at New York University, this morning's New York Times reports,

'He said he was grateful to the American Embassy and the Chinese government, which allowed him to leave China, and thanked Chinese officials for "dealing with the situation with restraint and calm."'
'"I hope to see that they continue to open discourse and earn the respect and trust of the people."'

On May 20

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Sun, 20 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...

... 1857 (155 years ago today), Agustina de Aragón died in Ceuta, an autonomous city of Spain located on the North Coast of Africa. She'd been born on the other side of the Mediterranean, in the Catalonian city of Reus, 71 years earlier. Agustina is known as Spain's Joan of Arc for having defended her country against troops from Napoleon's France. Then 22, Agustina is said to have brought apples to soldiers at the 1808 Battle of Zaragoza, and when they fled, she began to fire the cannon against the invaders, inspiring Spaniards to return to the ramparts and repel the French. (credit for circa 1810 print, by Francisco Goya, depicting Agustina at the cannon) She led the life of a guerrillera and soldier thereafter.

(Prior May 20 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Sat, 19 May 2012 16:14:00 +0000

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

'[C]losely following the laws of war is in our strategic interest. It undermines those who accuse the U.S. of hypocrisy and helps win the support of those who hold the same ideals.
'The best course for the United States – and its NATO allies – is to pledge this weekend in Chicago to more strictly abide by the laws of war they have created.'

– Reuters columnist and Pulitzer Prizewinner David Rohde, in Ending NATO’s double standard, a commentary that urges the United States to join 121 other countries in ratifying the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, among other acts that would help to take the sting out of complaints that it's hypocritical on matters of international criminal justice. Rohde's piece coincides with the Chicago summit meeting of member states of NATO, the 28-state North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The summit, in President Barack Obama's hometown, runs through Monday.

Attending to the language of justice

noreply@blogger.com (Kamari Maxine Clarke) — Sat, 19 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

(Part 2 of a 2-part series of introductory posts; Part 1 is here)

By the beginning of the 1990s, a new language of “justice” shaped discourses in new international and transnational spheres that were different from earlier periods.
Academics, practitioners, victims, and lawyers all asked:
► What, exactly, is justice?
► What is the relationship between justice and human rights?
► What is the relationship between justice and law?
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo (left) sought to establish a workable frame through to initiate and successfully prosecute cases in a way sensitive to local cultural realities, without sacrificing the court’s mission. But as he realized, the ICC must be committed both to the prosecution of crimes – that is, “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole,” as Article 5 of the Rome Statute puts it – and to the shifting, often contested terrain within which the Court was forced to operate.
The Prosecutor found an opening in Article 53 of the Statute, which outlines the conditions under which the Court can decline to begin a prosecution. Among the conditions, the Article creates an ambiguous limiting condition around the “interests of justice.”
As George Mason University anthropologist Mark Goodale and I write in our introduction to the 2011 essay collection we co-edited, Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era, Article 53 fails to specify:
► What kind of “interests” the Court should consider; and
► For what kind of “justice” these unarticulated interests work.
The provision “in the interests of justice” has developed in the Office of the Prosecutor into a complicated mechanism for mediating tensions between an abstract universality and actual contingencies within which the ICC investigates and prosecute its cases. For some, Article 53 provided the opportunity to allow prosecutorial discretion to consider the political ramifications of ICC-judicial action. For others, “justice” is idealistic, and the interpretation of the “interests of justice” provision should be exercised in restrictive terms. In the end, the Policy Paper on the Interests of Justice that the Office of the Prosecutor issued in September 2007 set a standard for action that involved balancing the interests of victims, peace, and judicial action.
This balance was not achieved with regard to the situation in Uganda, however.
I detailed the early stages of this situation, including efforts at peace talks and Uganda's December 2003 decision to refer the matter to the ICC, in my post yesterday. Between March 2004 and November 2005, alongside criticism from victims' groups in Uganda, the ICC Office of Prosecutor sought to work with some Ugandan organizations to achieve a range of peace goals. In so doing, it made clear that its role was not that of peacekeeping but was adjudicatory. Moreno-Ocampo was explicit that the ICC’s contribution to securing peace was in the Ugandan prosecution alone.(Later, in the Darfur situation, prosecutors shifted the onus of responsibility for maintaining peace to the U.N. Security Council. Again, responsibility for peace was pushed elsewhere.)
By insisting on the artificial division between politics and adjudication, the Office of the Prosecutor maintained that Uganda’s peace negotiations fell outside of the realm of its judicial mandate. Thus, while the position paper on Article 53 may map out particular possibilities that offer significant discretion for action, the reality is that by upholding binary divisions – divisions that locate peace as political and justice as embedded in the terrain of the legal – the end result was the reinforcement of social myths about peace and justice.
Focusing on individual criminal responsibility in the midst of larger systematic conditions of violence actually contributes to the denial of the political basis for justice. As I demonstrate in my 2009 book Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa, these fictions of justice lie at the heart of the assignment of criminal responsibility to a single individual. They are a significant part of the power of the Kony 2012 discourses being mobilized in pursuit of humanitarianism in Africa.
The Uganda-ICC contestations over justice, like the Kony 2012 video on which I also posted yesterday, highlight the fact that the ICC’s agenda, and the language deployed by human rights/rule of law advocates, have afterlives that go well beyond the enactment of the law and the courtroom. They shape the conditions of the possible, of what can be mobilized. They shape the terms on which life and death are selectively parsed.
Whether our goal is simply to establish doctrinal decisions that might deter violence, or to rectify the structural problems that undergird that violence in the first place, attending to the language of justice is a critical start.

On May 19

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Sat, 19 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...
... 1952 (60 years ago today), the Acting Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State, Jack B. Tate (left), issued a statement on U.S. policy respecting foreign states' claims to sovereign immunity from lawsuits in courts of the United States. The Tate Letter announced a shift away from an absolute theory of immunity, by which foreign states were free from all exposure, and toward a restrictive theory, by which some but not all foreign state activities would be immunized. Congress adopted the latter theory in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976. IntLawGrrl Jennifer Kreder has posted on the significance of this letter in litigation over by Nazi Germany.

(Prior May 19 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)

Introducing Kamari Maxine Clarke

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Fri, 18 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

It's our great pleasure today to welcome Dr. Kamari Maxine Clarke (left) as an IntLawGrrls contributor.
Kamari is a Professor of Anthropology and International and Area Studies at Yale University. She's also the founding Director of the Yale Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis, an interdisciplinary unit devoted to study of transnationalism, global formations, cultural and international change, especially in the global South, and Chair of the Yale Council on African Studies, which supports and coordinates study of Africa at the university. In addition, Kamari's a founding partner of the Leadership Enterprise for African Development, a Yale-Harvard collaboration that endeavors to increase leadership and governance capacity in public, business, and civil society sectors in Africa.

Initially educated in Canada, Kamari earned a master's in law at Yale and a Ph.D. in Political Anthropology at the University of California, Santa-Cruz. Her research examines issues related to religious nationalism, legal institutions, human rights and international law, and the interface of culture, power, and globalization. Her many publications include the 2009 book Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism in Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as a 2010 essay collection that she co-edited with anthropologist Mark Goodale, entitled Mirrors of Justice: Law and Power in the Post-Cold War Era.
Kamari draws upon this research for her 2-part series of IntLawGrrls posts (Part 1 here, Part 2 here). The series considers how the post-Cold War revival of international criminal adjudication is playing out in Africa, where International Criminal Court intervention has raised debate about peace and justice, and where viewers of a U.S.-made viral video have been asked to contribute to the capture of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. The series is based on Kamari's presentation at the March annual meeting of the American Society of International Law. It makes its IntLawGrrls début today amid debate (see here and here) over the significance of Uganda's recent capture, in the Central African Republic, of a Kony lieutenant.
As did another IntLawGrrls contributor, Lindsay Harris, Kamari dedicates her post to Wangari Muta Maathai (left), the Kenyan activist, leader of the Green Belt Movement, and the 1st African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. (photo credit)

Heartfelt welcome!

Kony 2012, the ICC & peace/justice divide

noreply@blogger.com (Kamari Maxine Clarke) — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:00:00 +0000

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute, in 2 parts, this version of the remarks I delivered on the "Africa & the ICC" panel at the March 2012 annual meeting of the American Society of International Law. A full version of my comments will be published in the ASIL Annual Meeting Proceedings)

The viral Kony 2012 video makes evident the dangerous slippage between justice and peace.
The short film is just a recent example of the tendency to treat justice (popularly seen as the law) and peace (seen as political) as mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, this justice-peace binary, and discourses that perpetuate it, obfuscate some of the issues at the core of the violence on the African continent. Justice becomes reduced to law, while peace loses any justice-producing qualities.
The famous adage, “We ask for justice, you give us law” speaks to part of the problem – to the assumption that the search for “justice” is fundamentally about the search for law.
There is another part to the problem. Actions that some might see as “justice-producing” – diplomacy, peace negotiations, economic redistribution strategies, forgiveness rituals – fall outside of the realm of “justice,” because others say these actions lack the “teeth” of legal accountability.
Those who focus on international criminal adjudication as justice have assumed that violence in certain places in Africa can be managed as a legal problem alone, rather than the larger structural problem that it is.
Related to this is the legal doctrine of command responsibility, which serves to assign guilt to a chief commander and a few top aides. Its power is as much legal as symbolic – it flags that impunity is at an end, that we are watching.
The problem is that in most violence-based contexts on the continent, where there are struggles over the management of resources or where violence is used to regulate civilian behavior, reassigning the guilt of thousands of people to a single chief commander does not accurately attend to the core problems involved in the making of war, let alone produce the conditions for a violence-free future.

Kony 2012
Kony 2012, in its very title, makes just that reassignment.
Inspired by the travels of Jason Russell, Kony 2012 narrates Uganda’s 25-year-old war, its violence, and the consequential death and displacement of millions of Ugandans. Drawing a direct link to Joseph Kony (prior IntLawGrrls posts), the film demands that Kony be held accountable for all of the violence committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army that he leads.
As Russell narrates in the film,

'Kony heads the Lord's Resistance Army, a Christian terrorist group which has reportedly abducted and forced more than 30,000 children to fight with them since their revolt began in 1986.'

He then discloses that his commitment was inspired by a promise he made to Jacob, a young Ugandan boy whose brother was killed by Kony’s men.
The story, then, is about how American political participation, and stopping a single leader, will rectify Uganda’s plight.

Russell’s savior complex is catapulted with the message that by donating money through a simple click of your mouse, and buying a kit that will help fund Kony’s arrest, every American can also be part of the solution to help poor Ugandan victims. The simplicity of the message is compelling, and suggests that Africa can be transformed by our philanthropy.
The sad reality is that Kony 2012 is one of a series of ultimately flawed philanthropic and humanitarian gestures which claim that capturing a single commander will solve Africa’s problems, and that justice equals law.
Compare Kony 2012’s message to that of the individualization of criminal responsibility seen in the new wave of international criminal justice. The same narrative inheres: that juridical action focused on a few commanders and top-ranking leaders will end impunity.
But the reality is that locating adjudication as the answer simply displaces the place of “the political.”
Re-engaging the political involves uncovering root causes at the core of violence itself. It returns us to the reality that solving Africa’s problems must involve African participation. Re-engaging the political must include a deliberative process and necessary rebuilding of institutions, and its laws must emerge out of a process that Ugandans see as politically legitimate.
An example of the perceived distinctions between peace and justice, especially as they relate to larger questions of criminal responsibility, may be found in aspects of the situation in Uganda.

Perceptions of justice & peace in Uganda

The ICC’s involvement in Uganda began in July 2003, when the Office of the Prosecutor identified Uganda as a situation of concern. At that point, prosecutors began examining the situation in Uganda with greater scrutiny.
Meanwhile, in November that same year, Betty Bigombe (right ), the former Minister of State for the Pacification of the North, began to meet with top LRA members in an attempt to reach a peaceful settlement to the conflict in northern Uganda. (photo credit)
These talks resulted in a geographically bounded 7-day ceasefire between the LRA and the Ugandan forces. The ceasefire was renewed continuously in anticipation of a final agreement at year’s end, as Lucy Hovil (left) (prior IntLawGrrls post), Senior Researcher at the International Refugee Rights Initiative, described in her 2011 paper entitled A poisoned chalice: Local civil society and the International Criminal Court’s engagement in Uganda.
But in December 2003, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni decided to refer the LRA-Uganda situation to the ICC.
By January 2004, the peace agreement had been disrupted, and renewed hostilities erupted in the region.
Bigombe continued her negotiation attempts, and with the support of a February 4, 2005, ceasefire declaration by Museveni, peace was sustained for 18 days. LRA attacks followed this period. The situation was further complicated when, on July 8 of that year, the ICC issued sealed warrants to arrest 5 senior members of the LRA, including Kony. The arrest warrants were unsealed on October 13. The timing was unfortunate, since Bigombe and other parties were in the midst of peace-talks with the LRA. And the ICC action was perceived as curtailing that process. The ICC was condemned by large numbers of Ugandans and human rights groups.
At the heart of this disagreement:
► To large numbers of the people of northern Uganda, justice was connected to any forum through which they could return home in safety and, from there, foster the growth of new forms of trust that could form the basis for sustainable peace.
► But from the perspective of the ICC, the primary image of justice was that of Kony and his other 4 commanders being found, extradited, and brought to trial.
The former emphasized the need to address structural injustice, while the latter placed an emphasis on individualized criminal responsibility as the basis for adjudication, and thus justice.
One grouping, those in Uganda, was living under conditions of bare life, while the other represented conditions of privilege and judicial aspirations for ending violence. There was a huge divide between these 2 social locations. While the prosecution of Kony might have been a critical component of the justice process, many Ugandans thought it should not happen at the expense of the victims (many of whom had become refugees) who wanted to return home and rebuild their lives.
These differences highlight the extent to which tackling the atrocious fallout from the war was being driven by conflicting conceptions of priorities.

(Tomorrow, Part 2: the need to attend to the language of "justice," in Uganda and elsewhere)

On May 18

noreply@blogger.com (Diane Marie Amann) — Fri, 18 May 2012 07:00:00 +0000

On this day in ...
... 1302 (710 years ago today), as dawn approached in what's now Belgium and then was the County of Flanders, formally part of France, Flemish guildsmen who'd formed a local militia sneaked into Bruges and massacred French troops garrisoned in the city. The militia are said to have killed anyone who couldn't correctly pronounce a Flemish phrase; by some accounts the phrase was schild en vriend, or "shield and friend," by others, des gilden vriend, or "friend of the guilds." The leaders of the attack now known as the Bruges Matins (in Flemish, Brugse Metten) – weaver Pieter de Coninck and butcher Jan Breydel – went on to defeat the French in a conventional battle, and are commemorated by the statue at right, located in the Bruges Markt. (photo credit)

(Prior May 18 posts are here, here, here, here, and here.)