The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
On 7 March 2010, between 1 and 3 am, groups of armed men launched simultaneous attacks on the villages of Dogo Nahauwa, Zot, and Ratsat, in Du District of Jos South Local Government Area, Plateau state, Nigeria. Driven from their homes by the sound of gunfire, villagers were maimed and killed by machete wielding men who also set homes on fire, displacing the survivors.
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
The Burmese junta, its armed forces known as the “Tatmadaw,” and other armed groups under government control are committing gross human rights violations against ethnic and religious minorities. Extrajudicial killings, torture, and forced labor are prevalent; rape and sexual abuse by the Tatmadaw are rampant; and from August 2008 through July 2009 alone, 75,000 civilians in the east, where armed conflict is ongoing, were forcibly displaced. The Tatmadaw shows a complete disregard for the principle of distinction, intentionally targeting civilians with impunity.
The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect
Abstract:
On 28 September 2009, government forces opened fire on opposition supporters peacefully protesting in a stadium in Conakry, Guinea. Demonstrators had gathered to contest junta leader Captain Dadis Camara's reported intention to run in the January 2010 elections, and break his promise to cede power to civilian rule. Over 150 civilians were killed in attacks that Human Rights Watch reports were premeditated and that the United Nations Commission of Inquiry concluded amounted to crimes against humanity. Over 1,200 people were injured, rape and sexual violence was widespread, and unknown numbers of protestors and political opponents were detained.
Habeas is working. The judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia have ably responded to the Supreme Court's call to review the detention of individuals at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As former federal judges, many of us expressed our confidence as amici in Boumediene v. Bush that courts are competent to resolve these cases. We write now to affirm that our confidence has been vindicated. While we take no position on particular cases, a review of the District Court's treatment of the Guantánamo litigation convinces us that the court has effectively developed a consistent, coherent, and stable jurisprudence.
The first wave, in the 1950s and '60s, was all about Community Rights and that new legal order. In the 1970s and '80s it was, ex nihilo, Individual Human Rights. And in the 1990s and this last decade it has been Citizenship Rights, destined, according to the European Court of Justice in case after case, to become the 'fundamental' status of European Citizens. (Have you ever wondered, as I have, about the epistemic status of this most recent mantra of the ECJ? Is it a legal realist prediction? A political desideratum? A statement of judicial intent? A revolutionary manifesto – seeing that it flatly contradicts the express provisions of the Treaty which clearly assigns to European Citizenship a mere supplementary or complementary supportive role in the Citizenship arena?) Be that as it may, there can be little argument that The Individual and his or her Rights are the most common, oft cited, self-celebratory clichés in the vocabulary of European legal discourse. In celebrating the Union's 50th birthday Angela Merkel, speaking for most of us, veritably gushed about Europe's success in positioning The Individual in the centre of its construct. And so it has. Likewise, if we look for a currency which is impervious to all market vicissitudes, to derivatives, to toxic bundling, it is the currency of Rights – in all three denominations, European, Human and/or Citizenship. It is the ever ready dividend which the Union's Board of Directors is generous in showering on an ever apathetic citizenry (as evidenced by the demoralizing decline in voter turn out for Euro-Parliament elections) and which is evoked whenever a pep-talk is called for.
In this article I discuss the nature of crimes against humanity. The various definitions that have been used, or alluded to, in the legal literature are outlined, and it is suggested that they fall neatly into two camps by interpreting 'humanity' differently. It is proposed that any theory which adequately captures the nature of this crime must distinguish it qualitatively from other 'lower' crimes, and that only members of one camp can do this. I go on to argue for one particular way of treating the crime – regarding it as a crime which hurts all humanity – and recommend adopting a view under which we would regard all humanity as one entity.
In FIAMM and Fedon the European Court of Justice has ruled that Community firms hit by US trade sanctions authorized by the WTO Dispute Settlement Body are not entitled to compensation from EC political institutions. The article discusses the cases in the background of current debates on the attitude of the Court of Justice towards international law and, more broadly, on European legal pluralism. From this standpoint, it provides a critical assessment of the legal issues involved in this litigation – internal status of WTO obligations, scope for manoeuvre of EC political institutions in international trade relations, liability for unlawful and lawful conduct – and offers a comparative analysis of its possible solutions, suggesting that a finding of liability for lawful conduct would have been a preferable outcome in both theoretical and substantive terms.
International human rights law requires states to protect people from abuses committed by third parties. Decision-makers widely agree that states have such obligations, but no framework exists for identifying when states have them or what they require. The practice is to varying degrees splintered, inconsistent, and conceptually confused. This article presents a generalized framework to fill that void. The article argues that whether a state must protect someone from third-party harm depends on the state's relationship with the third party and on the kind of harm caused. A duty-holding state must take reasonable measures to restrain the abuser. That framework is grounded in international law and intended to guide decisions in concrete cases. So after presenting and justifying the framework, the article applies it to two current debates in human rights law: when must a state protect against third-party harms committed outside its territory? And what must states do to protect women from private acts of violence? The article ends by suggesting how the same framework may inform analogous obligations outside human rights law.
This article uses the emergence of the protection of community interests in international law as a theoretical framework to explain a number of legal notions and regimes, such as jus cogens, obligations erga omnes, international responsibility towards the international community as a whole, and individual criminal responsibility. With reference to various international conventions, the work of the International Law Commission, and the case law of different international tribunals, it describes how changes in social intercourse at the global level have entailed structural transformations of the international legal order, as well as tensions caused by the concurrent legal protection of community and individual interests. The article further explains how the proposed theoretical framework may be used to address several concrete issues which have arisen in the contemporary legal debate, such as the question of exceptions to the immunity of state officials from foreign criminal jurisdiction, countermeasures by states other than the injured state in international responsibility, the legal regime of jus cogens, etc.
The restive Nile basin which has long been identified as a flashpoint prone to conflict embarked on a new path of cooperation with the launching of the Nile Basin Initiative (NBI). Anchored in a Shared Vision 'to achieve sustainable socio-economic development through the equitable utilization of, and benefits from, the common Nile Basin water resources', the NBI has provided a convenient forum for the negotiation of a Cooperative Framework Agreement (CFA) to set up a permanent, inclusive legal and institutional framework. Negotiation of the CFA has, however, faced a serious impasse as a result of the introduction of the concept of 'water security'. The introduction of this non-legal, indeterminate, and potentially disruptive concept is, indeed, a regrettable detour to a virtual blind-alley. The justifications for this fateful decision are totally unfounded and specious. The decision rather makes sense as an unwarranted move pushing into further obscurity the already intractable Nile waters question, at best, and a logical cul-de-sac in the decade-long negotiations which have arguably fallen prey to the hegemonic compliance-producing mechanism of 'securitization' sneaked in under the veil of 'water security', at worst. Resolution of the Nile waters question should thus first be extricated from the morass of 'water security' and then be sought nowhere but within the framework of international water law.