A blue ribbon opening panel at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday night at the City Bar will address whether international law has seen “The Death of Sovereignty?” in an era of debt downgrades, seccesionist conflicts, and covert military operations — and will be followed by a free wine and cheese reception.

Panels starting at 9 a.m. on Friday at Fordham will look at International Law and U.S. Grand Strategy, the Extraterritorial Reach of Anti-Bribery Legislation Libel Tourism, the UN Disabilities Convention, Sharia and U.S. Law, Developments in Commercial Arbitration, Access to Justice in the Middle East North Africa Region, Regulation of Private Military and Security Companeis, LGBT Rights in Africa, and the Impact of the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty on National Politics.  State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh will give a keynote talk at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, after a free buffet lunch in the atrium, on “International Lawyering for the U.S. in an Age of Smart Power.”

Panels starting at 9 a.m. on Saturday include Civilian Casualties in Modern War, Corporate Social Responsibility and Human Rights Law – Emerging Risks for Corporate Counsel, Private Litigation against Alleged Terrorist Sponsors, Intellectual Property Law, the New International Investment Arbitration Lawyer, Current Challenges for the International Criminal Court, Tribunal Procedures and Ethical Dilemmas for the Guantanamo Bay Military Tribunals, and Promoting Independence for Human Rights Lawyers Worldwide.   Former Yugoslav Tribunal Prosecutor Richard Goldstone will give a keynote address at 4:15 p.m. on Saturday on “The Future of International Criminal Justice: The Crucial Role of the United States.”

As always, admission is free for all students, all faculty, lawyers, and staff from co-sponsoring institutions, as well as all members of the American Branch of the International Law Association, the International Law Students Association, and the Association of the Bar of the City of New York.  Staff members of the United Nations and Permanent Missions to the United Nations can also attend for free.  The registration fee remains a modest $75 for the two days combined for all other practicing lawyers and members of the public.

We have a record number of co-sponsors this year, whose generous contributions makes the event possible. New sponsors include the International Bar Association, and law faculties from as far north as Maine and as far south as Virgina.    Further information and registration is available at www.ila-americanbranch.org or www.ilsa.org, or at the door

The overall theme of ILW 2011 is “International Law and National Politics.”

This year’s three-day conference will focus on issues arising from the interplay and intersection of international rules and norms and domestic politics and policymaking.  To what extent do international standards influence the application and interpretation of national law including complimentary or contrary policies sought by domestic policymakers, non-governmental actors and/or civil society?  Expert panels and discussion sessions will examine these and other issues with regard to such diverse areas as human rights and humanitarian intervention, national security, immigration, trade, labor, health care and the environment.  Though this is the primary focus of the conference, other inventive ideas and proposals, especially arising from current events, are always welcome for consideration as well.

The Co-Chairs of ILW 2011 are Professor Martin S. Flaherty, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice at Fordham Law School, mflaherty17{at}yahoo.com, Sahra Diament of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs, diament{at}un.org, and Jill Schmieder Hereau, Program Coordinator at the International Law Students Association, jshereau{at}ilsa.org.  

The Co-Chairs invite proposals for panels for ILW 2011.  Please submit proposals by email to each of the Co-Chairs no later than Wednesday, May 4, 2011.  Please also submit a copy of your proposal to ILA president Ruth Wedgwood, at rwedgwood{at}jhu.edu and to ILA executive committee chairman John Noyes, jen{at}cwsl.edu.

The proposals should be structured for 90-minute panels, and should include a formal title, a brief description of the subjects to be covered (no more than 75 words), and the names, titles, and affiliations of the panel chair and three or four likely speakers, with their contact information.  The proposals should also describe the format envisaged (point-counterpoint, roundtable, or other).  One of the objectives of ILW 2011 is to promote a dialogue among scholars and practitioners from across the legal spectrum, so whenever possible, panels should include presentations of divergent views. In addition, interactive discussions and moderated roundtables are welcome, rather than the traditional format of reading papers.

The inclusion of a broad range of speakers, including lawyers from the United Nations, diplomats from U.N. missions, private practitioners, government regulatory experts and experts from industry are welcome, quite apart from the usual broad range of academic writers and speakers.  We seek, above all else, informative and interesting debate.

Ruth Wedgwood is Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy; and Director of the International Law and Organizations Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University, Washington DC. She is also a  visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and a member of the UN Human Rights Committee.

If you’re a betting person, here’s a safe bet: On August 9, the balloting in the east African state of Rwanda will give world-famous military leader Paul Kagame yet another seven-year term as president. The astonishing margin of victory will impress even the modern grand viziers of Central Asia. The outcome is quite easy to predict, when no other candidates are allowed to campaign.

Given this and much else besides, it’s time Washington began to create some distance from a man who has earned his reputation as a de facto despot who terrorizes critics and does not shrink from political violence.

Kagame revels in his fame as the strategist who led a Tutsi invasion force from Uganda in 1994, pushing back the Hutu army and Hutu militia, though not before they perpetrated a shocking genocidal slaughter of hundreds of thousands of the country’s Tutsi minority, as well as moderate Hutu. Washington, reeling from Somalia and fearing another Black Hawk Down, refused to intervene. Madeline Albright was directed to inform the U.N. Security Council that, no, we would not reconstitute the U.N. peacekeeping force in Rwanda, and, further, the United States would veto any resolution that authorized other countries to do so. It was the season of peacekeeping misadventures, and the Clinton White House decided, as one former National Security Council official recalls, that it could not afford to intervene both in Haiti and Rwanda. Presidential Decision Directive 25, drafted by Richard Clarke as a white paper for peacekeeping, morphed into an excuse to “just say no.”

For the last 15 years, Kagame has at every turn invoked these memories to shoehorn the West into a nearly reflexive support for his government. Even Bill Clinton came back to apologize. Kagame has become a fixture at the United Nations in New York, regaling delegations in the Indonesian Lounge, extolling his vision of benevolent autocracy, claiming to admire Singapore as his model for economic growth and insisting that he and only he can keep Rwanda’s torn society knitted together.

In truth, the Rwandan leader presides over nothing more than hollow democracy. He has attacked and exiled any and all viable political opponents. The local press, as well as international journalists, have been bludgeoned and harassed. The regime uses the Stalinist crime of “divisionism” as a pretext to silence and prosecute any critic who dares question its policies or the state sanctioned version of the 1994 conflict.

Unsurprisingly, the intimidation extends to international institutions. President Clinton supported the effort to create an international war crimes tribunal to mete out justice for perpetrators and victims alike. The U.N. court was tasked to investigate the behavior of both sides in the 1994 conflict, operating from a neutral perch in Tanzania. Prosecutors decided first to take on the crimes of the prior Hutu government and militia, since the scale of its violence was larger and the cooperation of Kigali was necessary to obtain witnesses from Rwanda. A decade later, with numerous convictions under its belt and dozens of Hutu defendants still on trial, the U.N. tribunal turned to smaller-scale allegations against the Tutsi invasion force, Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front—including alleged massacres of civilians in the northeast and northwest of the country, as well as attacks on mostly Hutu refugee camps.

At this point, the Bush administration decided, unwisely, to pull the plug—repudiating the Hague prosecutor who planned to bring the cases, and insisting that the RPF cases could be entrusted to Kagame’s national courts as part of a “completion strategy.” Needless to say, that was the last of the investigations.

This was unfortunate, and not just for history’s sake. The West’s failure to address Tutsi violations of the laws of war has allowed Kagame to conclude, justifiably, that he can do nearly anything with impunity. He certainly hasn’t been intimidated by the observation of the U.N. Human Rights Committee in May 2009 that it was “concerned at the large number of persons, including women and children, reported to have been killed from 1994 onwards in the course of operations by the Rwanda Patriotic Army, and at the limited number of cases reported to have resulted in prosecution and punishment by the Rwandan courts.”

Nor has there been any penalty for Kagame’s destructive expedition into the Eastern Congo. The cross-border intervention gave the regime access to minerals ripe for extraction and valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Millions of civilians have been killed in the Eastern Congo conflict, and while Kagame was not the only culprit, his troops hardly quelled the violence.

At the same time, Kagame’s domestic critics have met with unfortunate fates. An outspoken political rival was recently shot and wounded in South Africa. A prominent newspaper editor was gunned down at the end of June, and the deputy president of the Democratic Green party was decapitated in July. Public meetings of rival parties have been banned. Kagame felt audacious enough to jail and threaten a 10-20 year sentence against an American lawyer and law professor—who hails from former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger’s alma mater in Minnesota—when he went to Rwanda to consult with one of Kagame’s political rivals.

Other smash-mouth ironies abound in this muzzled state. In 2007, President Kagame offered to contribute 3000 Rwandan troops to the peacekeeping force in Darfur, but only if his former chief of military intelligence, Emmanuel Karenzi Karake, was brought on as deputy U.N. force commander for the entire mission. Though Karake’s earlier career was dogged by unresolved allegations of atrocities against civilians in the northwest and northeast regions of Rwanda, the State Department’s Africa desk reportedly vouched for Karake and he got his appointment. In the middle of the mission, a Spanish court indicted Karake for war crimes, and still, he was reappointed to a second term. (Karake has now apparently broken with Kagame; he was arrested in April on “serious charges of immoral conduct.”)

Even Rwanda’s celebrated “gacaca” process—sending accused genocidaires to be tried and sentenced in local settings, rather than molder without trial in inconceivably overcrowded prisons—has not lived up to its reputation. The U.N. Human Rights Committee recently noted the “lack of legal training for judges and reports of corruption” in the Gacaca courts—along with impairment of “the rights of defence” even “in cases where sentences of up to 30 years’ imprisonment may be handed down.”

In promoting humanitarian and democratic ends abroad, the Obama administration initially got off to a slow start. The ideals of Eleanor Roosevelt took a back seat to the desire to be “not Bush.”

But the record has lately improved. With this new moral realism, the Obama team ought to take a close and critical look at its erstwhile friend in Africa. He is not what he seems.

Ruth Wedgwood is Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy; and Director of the International Law and Organizations Program at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, John Hopkins University, Washington DC. She is also a  visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Previously, she served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, and designed the redaction procedures that became the Classified Information Procedures Act

A striking consensus is emerging in Washington for a closer relationship with the International Criminal Court. Even some staunch conservatives have backed the idea of lending logistical, political, and diplomatic assistance to the ICC on a case-by-case basis – to act against the most shocking outrages of genocide, crimes against humanity, and systematic war crimes.

Yet, with notoriously bad timing, the path to this cooperation may be washed away, due to a troublesome and unnecessary fight brewing at a sister criminal tribunal in The Hague.

The fracas has arisen at the ad hoc United Nations war crimes court tasked since 1993 to try cases from the bloody ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia. This is a high-performing tribunal that has enjoyed strong leadership from its American judges and other admired jurists. The court is currently focused on the prosecution of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and has an indictment and arrest warrant waiting for fugitive Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic.

But this exemplary war crimes court also has a mess on its hands, partly of its own creation. The outcome will hold an important lesson for the transparency that any international criminal court should maintain, even amidst the difficulties of dealing with sovereign states. To be acceptable to democratic states and publics, an international court should make available the logic and effect of its rulings. There can be no secret jurisprudence, unavailable to debate and critique by an audience of lawyers, political leaders, and citizens.

Yet, in a summary proceeding now underway at the tribunal, three judges hailing from China, Turkey, and South Africa are threatening to send a French journalist to jail on a charge of criminal contempt for revealing the bare-bones logic of two appellate opinions. No witness has been endangered. No sealed arrest warrant was thwarted. And the criminal case to which the decisions pertained was ended by the fatal heart attack of former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic in his jail cell in The Hague in March 2005.

The target of the contempt proceeding is a former Le Monde journalist who worked as a spokesman for the international prosecutor. In a French-language memoir entitled Paix et Châtiment (“Peace and Chastisement”) and a 2 ½ page essay for the Bosnian Institute web site, author Florence Hartmann gave a spare description of two appellate rulings of the UN Tribunal.

This revelation was hardly earthshaking. Indeed, the practical effect of the disputed decisions was widely reported in the press well before the publication of Ms. Hartmann’s essays.

But Ms. Hartmann’s book title references a more general delicacy that may have been provocative to tribunal sensibilities. The book is subtitled as a history of “The Secret Wars of Politics and International Justice.” Dispassionate observers of international criminal justice don’t need a book to know that a court such as the Yugoslav tribunal can be subjected to a certain amount of buffeting by the states that provide its assistance, as well as the states that resist its legal process. The varied personalities of international tribunals – added to the mixture of national legal cultures and difficulties of acquiring evidence without coercive power – necessarily produce more drama than an ordinary state criminal court. One wishes to maintain the dignity that any court deserves. But it is not a bad thing to have an accurate recorded history of the historical sturm und drang before it fades from view.

The explosive nature of this contempt case, though, turns on the aching quality of the international community’s underlying failure in Bosnia. In July 1995, United Nations peacekeepers remained impassive when Bosnian Serb forces carted off 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys from the city of Srebrenica – an enclave that the UN Security Council had guaranteed as a “safe zone.” The 8,000 men and boys were taken into the woods, and summarily executed by firing squads.

Wearing blue berets, the UN peacekeepers did not resist the Serb takeover. They were under-equipped, but the defense minister of the troop-supplying NATO country also called UN officials to demand that no air power should be used. Nor did the peacekeepers demand the right to accompany the trucks, in order to guarantee the safety of the prisoners. From the shame of these events, the government of the Netherlands resigned from office, and the Dutch parliament launched a three-volume study of the episode. It is, of course, a quiet irony that the various international war crimes tribunals are headquartered in The Hague.

In prosecuting former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide in Bosnia, it was helpful to the war crimes tribunal to show that he frequently met with Bosnian Serb military and political leaders during the critical events. As it turned out, Serbia’s defense ministry kept minutes and meeting summaries of an entity called the Supreme Defence Council, and the war crimes tribunal sought their turnover.

One can only sympathize with the difficulty of prying records out of a government that does not want to supply them. The availability of formal legal process does not mean much, when there is no way to enforce it. Still, it was probably unwise for tribunal prosecutor Carla del Ponte to send Belgrade a broadly-worded letter that promised “support in general terms” for Belgrade’s demands for black-outs and exclusions from the critical documents – even before she had the chance to see them. This would prove all the more troublesome when the prosecution was excluded from the key proceeding in the trial chamber where the blackouts were approved.

It was also bargaining away something that might not be hers to give. In particular, under the published rules of the war crimes tribunal, a state could request such omissions from documents only where a “national security interest” was at stake.

Instead, Belgrade’s asserted basis for the black-out request was avowedly to avoid justice in another court – fearing that the pending suit for civil damages brought by Bosnia against Serbia under the Genocide Convention in the International Court of Justice might be strengthened by the revelation of this evidence.

For reasons that still remain hard to fathom, the war crimes trial chamber granted much of Serbia’s request, by interpreting the published rules to permit blackouts from the documents in order to protect the Balkan state’s “vital national interest” – a term not used in the tribunal rules – and placing in that category the risk of civil liability in another forum. The prosecutor was denied the right to appeal the ruling to the appellate chamber.

This did not serve to thwart the criminal trial of Serbia’s strongman, since the documents were still available in full to the sitting judges of the criminal trial bench. Indeed, those judges later found that there was sufficient evidence to sustain a prima facie criminal finding of genocide against Yugoslav president Milosevic. But the documents were denied to its neighboring international court that had responsibility to adjudicate the civil case for genocide.

Eighteen months after the first procedural ruling, additional Serbian military files came to light that allegedly showed that the Bosnian Serb commander directing the Srebrenica massacre, Ratko Mladic, was in fact a serving officer in the Yugoslav armed forces. This could put Serbia directly in the chain of causation of the massacre.

On this occasion, the trial judges apparently refused the blackout of the files, and on Serbia’s appeal, the appellate judges finally had a chance to rule. They reportedly concluded that the trial chamber had applied the wrong legal test in framing the issue as “vital national interest” but that Serbia had relied on the error and so had a right to have the same standard applied. In another opinion, the appeals chamber ruled that the documents could not be released until after the appeals case was resolved.

The result, then, was to deny the availability of the records to the plaintiff and the judges in the International Court of Justice. The fault, if there is any, is likely to reside in a set of miscast tribunal rules that did not permit timely appeal from the first erroneous trial chamber ruling.

But this also shows why the judges might wish to reread Edgar Allan Poe’s tale of the purloined letter. A judicial ruling whose logic is made public may provoke disagreement. But a ruling whose existence and logic are kept secret is likely to provoke suspicion.

The journalist in question, Florence Hartmann, has both admirers and detractors for her prior role as public spokesman to Yugoslav war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte. Ms. Hartmann apparently took a rather more active role at the court than an ordinary porte-parole. The tribunal was subject to contests and quarrels not always visible from the outside.

Still, the issue at stake in the current Hartmann contempt proceeding does not turn on the former spokesman’s conduct at the tribunal, but her limited revelations of these two appellate opinions afterwards. To be sure, any third-party government considering cooperation with an international tribunal wants to know that sensitive information will be protected. But Serbia was not a third-party government. Rather, it was the public instrument used by Milosevic to advance his agenda of nationalism and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

The judges of the appellate chamber include some venerable figures, including Judge Fausto Pocar, a widely respected Italian international lawyer and former member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee (and, I should say, a personal friend). So, too, Judge Theodor Meron, a former professor at NYU law school, who is also a friend, has innumerable admirers for his pioneering work in international humanitarian law.

But the Court has gone offsides in this contempt proceeding. The initial investigation conducted by the “amicus curiae” contempt prosecutor was deeply flawed – failing to provide a certified translator in taking the defendant’s initial statement and instead relying on an often inaudible tape-recording, and publicly eschewing any exploration of exculpatory evidence – a duty that is incumbent on any prosecutor. The ad hoc prosecutor pursuing the contempt seems to think it sufficient to characterize her as a “defiant” person.

So, too, in a matter of such public import, it is unrealistic to bury matters in the archive. The world was keenly interested in the parallel suit for genocide brought by Bosnia against Serbia in the International Court of Justice, a court that hears state-to-state complaints and can award damages. The blacking-out of evidence in the criminal trial meant that the international judges in the parallel civil case did not have the benefit of a full record.

The public study of the procedural rulings and potential misfires of international war crimes tribunals remains important in figuring out how to assure fair procedures in future international trials. It is no shame to admit that we don’t yet know how to get things right, in a world in which cases have to be proved in the teeth of uncooperative states. In the design of future war crimes tribunals, it is worthy of debate whether the rules that permitted this result must be changed.

To be sure, the judges at the International Court of Justice concluded, even without the disputed evidence, that Serbia was civilly liable for failure to prevent genocide. But no damages were assessed. This disparity will continue to haunt history and the conscience of all international lawyers who wish to believe that justice is possible even amidst high politics.

The possibility of reopening the thwarted genocide damages suit of Bosnia against Serbia in the International Court of Justice is distant, because the Bosnian government is divided among the three ethnic communities and the Serb member of the collective presidency would object.

But we should avoid such misfires in the future. It does not advance the cause of international criminal justice to threaten a person who described the boggled procedure with criminal contempt.