Internationally acclaimed women scholars and advanced PhD candidates are invited to the second conference on the Creation of International Law, to be hosted by the University of Wisconsin on April 4-5, 2014 as part of its Wisconsin International Law Journal annual symposium. The intention is to continue and expand the network of women scholars and practitioners that was launched in 2009 in Norway to support their engagement in public international law. The theme of the second conference is: Exploring the International Law Components of Peace. The pursuit of peace remains a global challenge and there is a need for reflection as to how the current international public law institutional and normative structure functions and what are the gaps? Call for papers and more details here.
EU Legal Integration Survey
As part of the Schumpeter CONREASON Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, an online expert survey is being conducted on judicial attitudes towards European law and European integration in the European Union. The survey focuses on supreme and constitutional courts and their doctrinal response to the legal integration process. The survey targets all those who are potential experts in the EU legal integration process: academics, judges, law students, etc.
The online questionnaire takes only a few minutes to complete. You can choose on which court you wish to report and even take several surveys in case you want to report on more than one court. To take the survey just click on the link below, which will take you to the survey page of the CONREASON Project Website:
http://www.conreasonproject.com/expert-survey.html
Please feel free to contact the project team (conreason {at} mpil(.)de) for questions and remarks regarding the questionnaire. Feedback is welcome.
ICJ Call for Papers
The International Court of Justice has issued a call for papers for a panel at its conference on the centenary of the Peace Palace in September. This is probably a first for the Court (at least I can’t remember it issuing a call for papers before), and the selection of the papers will be made by a panel of three of the Court’s judges. Appropriately enough, the Court seems to be accepting submissions only by snail mail. Details here.
Pluricourts Call for Papers – Legitimacy and Effectiveness of International Criminal Courts
This conference seeks papers pursuing empirical, normative, comparative or theoretical approaches to the study of ICTs, and welcomes contributions from law and social science, including philosophy, sociology, criminology, psychology and history. Details here.
Bolivia Institutes Proceedings Against Chile Before the ICJ
After a lull of almost a year and a half, the ICJ got a new case – yesterday Bolivia instituted proceedings against Chile with regard to Chille’s alleged obligation to negotiate with Bolivia a fully sovereign acess to the Pacific Ocean for the latter. The Court’s press release is here, and the application here. Seems like a rather unorthodox case – any comments by readers on whether there have been other cases in which the main claim by the applicant is that the respondent has a duty to negotiate with it are welcome.
CERD and Hate Speech
An important case on hate speech was recently decided by the CERD Committee, TBB v. Germany, dealing with the intersection or conflict between the prohibition of racial discrimination and the freedom of expression (thanks to Marty Lederman for the pointer). The case concerned an interview given by a Mr Sarrazin in a journal that contained derogatory and offensive statements against the Turkish population in Germany; the statements were however given in the context of at least a superficially reasoned discussion dealing mainly with the economy. The TBB, a Turkish association in Germany, wanted Mr Sarrazin to be prosecuted for hate speech; the German prosecutors refused to do so, finding that while some of S’s statements were offensive, a prosecution would under the circumstances run afoul of the freedom of expression.
Article 4 CERD explicitly requires states parties to ‘declare an offence punishable by law all dissemination of ideas based on racial superiority or hatred’; however when doing so they must give ‘due regard to the principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,’ including the freedom of expression. The Convention itself thus even at the purely textual level creates a potential conflict between the duty to incriminate hate speech and the freedom of expression, without providing much guidance as to how this conflict can be resolved. Text aside, the same set of issues is of course raised under other human rights treaties, such as the ECHR and the ICCPR, or in the domestic context.
James Stewart on Perisic
Readers might be interested in James Stewart’s analysis on OJ (here and here) of the ICTY Appeals Chamber’s Perisic judgment – James is rightly highly critical of the Chamber’s analysis with regard to aiding and abetting liability and specific direction. For my own take on the judgment and an outline of the issues see my earlier post here.
The Limits of Aiding and Abetting Liability: The ICTY Appeals Chamber Acquits Momcilo Perisic
On 28 February by 4 votes to 1 the ICTY Appeals Chamber acquitted Momcilo Perisic (judgment; summary), the former chief of staff of the FRY army and one of Slobodan Milosevic’s pet generals. With the recent acquittal of Croatian generals Gotovina and Markac, the Appeals Chamber seems to be in something of a forgiving mood. Perisic was previously convicted by a divided Trial Chamber (voting 2 to 1) for aiding and abetting crimes in Sarajevo and Srebrenica committed by Bosnian Serbs, and on the basis of superior responsibility for crimes in Croatia committed by Croatian Serbs, and was sentenced to 27 years in prison. The Appeals Chamber’s decision is in my view unfortunate for a number of reasons, even though it is not as utterly shambolic as was the Gotovina acquittal.
Some differences between Perisic and Gotovina are readily apparent. While Gotovina and Markac were convicted by a unanimous Trial Chamber and then had their convictions set aside by the Appeals Chamber on the facts (and at that by 3 votes to 2), with regard to Perisic there was already one dissenting opinion in the Trial Chamber on which an appeal could naturally latch itself on, and the Appeals Chamber reversed (mainly, but not exclusively) on points of law rather than fact, as I will now briefly explain.
The Bosnian part of the case indeed turned on a point of law: whether the actus reus of aiding and abetting as a form of liability requires assistance given by the accused to the perpetrators of the crime to have been specifically directed to aiding the commission of the crime. The jurisprudence of the ICTY on this point has not been clear; the majority of the Trial Chamber considered that specific direction should not be a requirement for aiding and abetting, whereas Judge Moloto in dissent did. In essence the majority’s argument was this – the aid given by the FRY as a state and Perisic as an individual to the Bosnian Serbs was instrumental for their war effort, and was given in full knowledge that their forces were committing crimes, with knowledge that the aid given will assist the commission of the crimes satisfying the needed level of mens rea. Therefore, Perisic was an aidor and abettor. For Judge Moloto, on the other hand, the majority’s approach failed to distinguish between aid to the commission of specific crimes and aid to the war effort generally, which was not intrinsically criminal for the purposes of the ICTY’s Statute (even though, as a matter of general international law, the FRY’s intervention in Bosnia amounted to aggression). In Judge Moloto’s view, there was no evidence that the aid provided by Perisic was specifically directed to the commission of the crimes for which he was indicted.
The Appeals Chamber, Judge Liu dissenting, basically followed Judge Moloto’s approach, finding that specific direction was an essential element of the actus reus of aiding and abetting liability, and that it could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the aid given by Perisic was specifically directed to the commission of crimes in Sarajevo and Srebrenica, particularly bearing in mind the general nature of the aid given in terms of logistics and personnel and Perisic’s lack of proximity to the crimes themselves.
IntLawGrrls Back Online
The IntLawGrrls blog is now back online, with a slightly different editorial structure and a new website (www.ilg2.org). IntLawGrrls new editors (Cecilia Bailliet, Andrew Ewart, Sital Kalantry, Elizabeth Ludwin King, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, and Milena Sterio) invite everyone to check it out.
Dr Amanda Perreau-Saussine de Ezcurra Law Prize Fund
A fund has been set up in the memory of our late colleague and friend Amanda Perreau-Saussine de Ezcurra to create a law prize at the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law to reward students’ outstanding performance in the study of the History and Philosophy of International Law. The Faculty obituary for Amanda can be found here, while the obituary written by Patrick Capps for EJIL: Talk! is available here. Any donations from our readers to the fund would be very much appreciated, and can be made here.
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