Archive for the ‘International & Comparative Law’ Category
The War is Over But What Impact Will the Restatement of Employment Law Have?
posted by Michael Zimmer
When, a number of years ago, the Council and the Director of the American Law Institute announced that the Institute was undertaking a project in the area of labor and employment law, it followed its long tradition of deciding the project’s subject, its type and who would be the Reporters without input from the membership at large. That the topic was employment law was not a surprise. After all, Lance Liebman, the ALI’s Director, is a well known teacher and scholar of employment law. The nature of the project, a Restatement, was, however, somewhat of a surprise. Restatement projects look to the common law in a particular area. A problem with a Restatement of the common law of employment is that the common law plays a small role in a large, ungainly, some would say, disorganized jumble of state and federal laws, statutes and common law covering a wide range of issues that bear on employment. There is little apparent coherence to it. So, in the admittedly small world of labor and employment academics, it was no surprise that the idea of a Restatement provoked widespread protest. Some feared that a Restatement of Employment Law would “cement” in place law that was woefully inadequate for present much less future times. For some, that fear was exacerbated by the choice of the Reporters and the initial Advisory Group. I liked the idea of an ALI project but, given the mishmash that is labor and employment law, hoped for a Principles project to develop a policy basis that could be used to develop a coherent body of labor and employment law.
In face of the protests, the project moved slowly at first as some Reporters left and others joined the project. Once three chapters had been completed and approved by the ALI Council, the opposition got organized to try to stop those chapters, and indeed the whole project, from proceeding any further. Many of those opposed undertook the unusual move toorganize and hold a well- attended meeting at Hastings to present and to develop critiques that argued that the Restatement project should be abandoned. The work of 18 employment law academics was presented at the meeting. The results of that meeting and the critiques prepared for it were sent to all ALI members for their consideration before last May’s annual meeting that had the first three chapters on the agenda for adoption. The critiques were also published in a special issue, volume 13, issue #1 of the Employment Rights and Employment Policy Journal, http://www.kentlaw.edu/ilw/erepj/abstracts/v13n1/index.html.
Given the heated nature the whole issue had become, it should be no surprise that the dispute became personal. The lines were drawn with the ALI on one side and the Labor Law Group on the other. While the debate at the ALI meeting this past May was heated, the membership, as it generally does, accepted the recommendation of the Council and approved the first three chapters more or less intact. Read the rest of this post »
November 11, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Posted in: Civil Rights, Employment Law, International & Comparative Law, Uncategorized
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Shame on the Brits!
posted by Nate Oman
By temperament, I am not a particularly passionate person. Every so often, however, the world throws up an event of such mindless horror that even phlegmatic me is roused to ire. Chris Lund points out such a horror in this post over at Prawfs. All I can say is, “What the hell are their Lordships thinking over at the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom?” Shame! Shame on you! Read the rest of this post »
October 22, 2009 at 7:50 am
Posted in: History of Law, International & Comparative Law, Jurisprudence, Just for Fun, Law Practice, Politics, Weird
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Article on Free Speech and Terrorism
posted by Gerard Magliocca
I want to draw your attention to a paper by my colleague Shawn Boyne that examines the tension between free speech values and counterterrorism efforts. Shawn is doing some terrific work on comparative criminal law issues. Here is the Abstract:
Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the United States and many European states have sought ways to disrupt the radicalization process that leads individuals to join the call to Islamic jihad. This strategy has included attempts to prosecute individuals who post or help to circulate calls to jihad that appear on the internet. While this speech is unpopular, it is an open question whether the speech, standing alone, incites violence. More importantly, these prosecutions may both chill speech and open the door to wider governmental efforts to regulate unpopular speech. To explore the tension between security and civil liberties triggered by such strategies, I analyze three recent criminal cases in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. I examine the prosecution strategies and the legal hurdles that prosecutors faced in securing convictions. I show that, in an effort to surmount the legal problems inherent in prosecuting these cases, prosecutors have broadly branded the defendants as terrorists and evil-doers. The broader impact of these strategies, risks shaking a core element of democratic governance.
August 11, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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BRIGHT IDEAS: Susan Brewer on Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq
posted by Deven Desai
Today’s Bright Ideas post comes from Professor Susan Brewer. Professor Brewer teaches history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She is the author of To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II. Today she shares how she the ideas behind and how she came to write her latest book, Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. As someone who loves history and studies of the way media is used to shape agendas, this books looks like a winner. But I’ll let Professor Brewer explain more on that.
PROFESSOR SUSAN BREWER
on
Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq
Why America Fights explores the packaging and sale of war aims by the U.S. government to the American people over the past century. It analyzes propaganda in six wars—the Philippine War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War—intended to rally public support by showing Americans that they fight for democracy, freedom, security, and economic opportunity. Such messages from “to make the world safe for democracy” to “protect the American way of life,” assure the public that their ideals and interests are one and the same.
I had the idea for this project while I was working on my first book, To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States during World War II (1997). It examines the British government’s careful efforts to construct a lasting “special relationship” with the United States when it recognized that only its wealthy ally had the power to help the depleted British Empire through postwar recovery. Propagandists analyzed U.S. political culture to determine the best way to win American hearts and minds. For example, to overcome what they called the “ancient grudge” held by Americans against the British Empire, British officials sought to link the empire with America’s epic frontier past so popular in films and novels. They called their theme “white men in tough places.” Although officials acknowledged the racist nature of such a message, they thought it would encourage white Americans to identify with the colonizer rather than the colonized. Besides they knew that most African Americans were not allowed to vote. Intrigued by the way in which British policymakers defined their interests and constructed appealing messages to promote them to the American public, I wondered about U.S. government efforts to do the same.
My research also was influenced by the George H. W. Bush administration’s presentation of the Persian Gulf War of 1991. I observed how the administration used explicit and implicit references to past wars to justify the current one: the comparison of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler; the story of the invading Iraqi troops pulling the plugs on incubators holding Kuwaiti babies, later discredited, which recalled World War I propaganda showing the invading Germans bayoneting the babies of Belgium, also later discredited; and the steady assurance that the Persian Gulf War would not be another Vietnam. These themes, I thought, had a lot to do with popular history and culture and not so much to do with U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. I wanted to investigate just what government officials have chosen to tell and not to tell when convincing the American people to support war.
To see how various administrations defined their war aims and then how they decided to present them to the public, I conducted research at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the presidential libraries. I analyzed the resulting messages as delivered through speeches, posters, movies, radio shows, television appearances, magazine ads, and news stories. What I found was that to promote war aims dedicated to defeating the enemy and expanding U.S. power, propaganda portrayed Americans as liberators, protecting civilization and advancing progress. “To make the world a decent place to live in,” declared a World War I poster. In this case, as in others, the world failed to live up to its projected image, leaving Americans feeling disillusioned about their intervention in the Great War. One of the goals of official propaganda in World War II would be to restore public confidence in America’s global mission and build a consensus in favor of ongoing U.S. commitments overseas.
From war to war, propaganda revived the portrayal of the United States as a just and benevolent nation using its power to create a better world. In doing so, it typically focused attention on American cultural beliefs rather than global realities, presenting idealized versions of the United States and its allies while dehumanizing the enemy. It sought to win over the American people by appealing to what they wanted to believe about themselves. I hope that readers of Why America Fights will consider why these official constructions of wartime national identity remain so compelling.
August 10, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Tags: history, propaganda, Susan Brewer, war
Posted in: Bright Ideas, Constitutional Law, International & Comparative Law, Politics
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New Empirical Work on International Criminal Law
posted by Jenia Turner
Máximo Langer and Joseph W. Doherty at UCLA have just posted Managerial Judging, Court’s Limited Information and Parties’ Resistance: An Empirical Assessment of Why the Reforms to Expedite Procedure of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Did Not Work. It’s an excellent piece and a rare example of empirical work in international criminal law. Its findings show the valuable contributions that empirical studies could make to the field.
Langer and Doherty examine whether procedural reforms at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which were introduced to expedite the tribunal’s proceedings, were in fact successful. The study finds that these so-called “managerial judging” reforms-e.g., introducing pretrial judges, mandating pretrial conferences, asking the parties to exchange information about their cases earlier in the process, encouraging them to reach agreements on facts and legal issues, and reducing the number of witnesses-failed to accomplish their intended purposes. In fact, many of these reforms lengthened the proceedings.
The study controlled for a number of variables that could explain the result (e.g., specific case characteristics, court capacity, and guilty pleas). So why might the reforms have failed? The main reason seems to be that the new managerial tools were not used frequently enough. Moreover, the tools that were used added procedural steps that took up time, without reducing other procedures to make up for the added time.
July 26, 2009 at 7:49 am
Tags: Criminal Procedure, Empirical analysis, ICTY, international criminal law, managerial judging
Posted in: Criminal Procedure, Empirical Analysis of Law, International & Comparative Law
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German Bundestag Passes Plea Bargaining Law
posted by Jenia Turner
Germany was once known as a “land without plea bargaining.” Those days are now long gone.
On May 28, the German Bundestag passed a law amending the German Code of Criminal Procedure to regulate plea bargaining. The legislation ratifies a practice that developed informally more than two decades ago. As bargaining became more common in the late 1980s and 1990s, courts intervened to set broad requirements for the practice. The recent legislation largely codifies these requirements. But there are also some important departures and other provisions that are interesting from a comparative perspective.
July 16, 2009 at 9:30 am
Tags: German Criminal Procedure Code, Germany, plea bargaining
Posted in: Criminal Procedure, International & Comparative Law
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How Far Can Lawyers Go in Criticizing the Court? An International Perspective
posted by Jenia Turner
At the end of May, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid court composed of national and international judges, issued a warning to a defense lawyer for offending the court and obstructing the proceedings. The lawyer was Jacques Verges, a French attorney who has made a career of representing notorious clients and taking on politically charged cases. At the ECCC, he represents Khieu Samphan, Cambodia’s former Head of State, who is accused of committing crimes against humanity and war crimes during the horrific era of the Khmer Rouge. Verges was reprimanded for using delay tactics and implying that the court’s judges are corrupt. The decision raises the question of how far an attorney may go in raising questions about the integrity of an international court.
Verges made the remarks during a pretrial hearing concerning his client’s request for release from detention. During the hearing, which the court had postponed twice to accommodate Verges’s schedule, Verges made no comments on the merits of the motion, but instead hinted at the possibility of the tribunal’s corruption:
…Firstly, I shall be silent because it is not for me to be more concerned about your honour than you yourselves are. If you consider that corruption should not be discussed, I am not going to force the discussion on you. I shall be silent because I understand your caution in this regard and I think that the presumption of innocence that you sometimes deny the accused may be of some benefit to you. And I shall be silent because the Head of State which hosts you has stated publicly that he wishes you to leave, making of you, in a moral sense, squatters. I shall be silent also because a member of the Government of the country that hosts you stated that you were obsessed only by money, thus confirming the charge-be it grounded or not-of corruption, which blights the tribunal.
In response, the court warned Verges that if he continued along these lines, he would be sanctioned. The court also forwarded a copy of the warning to the Cambodian and French bars.
What makes the situation at the ECCC complicated is that there have been numerous allegations of corruption involving ECCC court staff. These allegations have come from inside staff members, human rights NGOs, and the UN itself, whose Office of Internal Oversight Services investigated allegations of corruption and delivered a report to the Cambodian government implicating specific individuals (the Cambodian government has not revealed or followed up on this report). Both defense attorneys and victims’ attorneys have called on the court to investigate the question further. So far, the allegations focus on kickbacks that ECCC staff members may have paid to Cambodian officials in return for their positions at the court. The allegations appear to implicate only the Cambodian staff and not any of the judges. But motions by other ECCC defense teams have argued that even corruption among court staff could affect the fairness of the trial. As one motion states: “if staff members entrusted with sensitive tasks are willing to engage in graft, those individuals may be equally willing to follow improper instructions, such as the manipulation of evidence to support a preordained political outcome.”
Verges’s comments to the court might be read to stop short of any direct accusation of the judges, but they certainly hint at the possibility of improper motives. Perhaps more relevant for purposes of the warning is that his comments were raised during a hearing on a motion to release his client from detention, distracted from the merits of the motion, and did not appear to be reasonably calculated to advance the legal interests of his client. Trying accused war criminals from the terrible era of the Khmer Rouge remains the ECCC’s primary business. As long as this mandate remains, the ECCC judges cannot allow the trial of every defendant, and every related motion, to be turned into an argument about the court’s own separate problems. ECCC judges were therefore correct to warn him that they would be prepared to take more serious measures to ensure orderly and speedy proceedings.
Still, while Verges’s statements may have justified the warning in this case, the ECCC should be cautious in reprimanding lawyers simply for raising the question of corruption at the court. The issue is too important to the court’s legitimacy, as some of the international judges themselves have acknowledged. It would be unfortunate if the only measure that the court takes in response to allegations of corruption is to reprimand defense attorneys for raising the issue.
July 9, 2009 at 10:43 am
Tags: corruption, Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Jacques Verges, Legal Ethics
Posted in: International & Comparative Law, Legal Ethics
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Truthseeking and Criminal Procedure in the Supreme Court’s Last Term
posted by Jenia Turner
Many thanks to Concurring Opinions and Dan Solove for inviting me to guest blog and to Dan for the kind introduction. I look forward to the visit and am excited to be part of C.O.’s talented and diverse group of bloggers.
As the Supreme Court’s term has just ended, I could not help but comment briefly on some of the Court’s pronouncements on criminal procedure. Because of my interest in comparative criminal procedure, I was curious to observe how in several recent opinions (Herring v. United States; Montejo v. Louisiana; Kansas v. Ventris), the Court suggested that “truthseeking” was a central concern of our criminal justice system and may trump individual liberties in certain cases. Specifically, the Court construed the Sixth Amendment right to counsel and the Fourth Amendment’s exclusionary rule more narrowly than before, out of concern that these individual rights and remedies interfere with the goal of truthseeking. For those familiar with the “inquisitorial” systems of continental Europe, the focus on truthseeking would sound familiar. European courts have long emphasized the preeminence of the search for truth in the criminal process. But is the adversarial American criminal justice system moving toward a new understanding of its goals, similar to that prevalent in inquisitorial systems? Are we moving away from our entrenched “anti-inquisitorialism“?
One of the latest decisions of the term suggests that truthseeking does not always win the battle. In D.A.’s Office v. Osborne (a 5 to 4 decision), the Court denied the existence of a due process right to DNA evidence after conviction. In that case, the State of Alaska conceded that there was no reason to doubt that the retesting of the evidence requested by Osborne would conclusively establish his guilt or innocence. If Obsorne were to be proven innocent, the retesting could also help determine the true offender.
The only reason given by Alaska for denying Osborne access to the DNA evidence was that it would interfere with the state’s interest in finality. The Court’s majority agreed and also declared its reluctance to interfere with Alaska’s decision by creating a federal constitutional right to access DNA after conviction. The Court acknowledged that 47 states and the federal government already provide for such access. It was interesting to note that both the majority and the minority made this point in favor of their position-the majority as a reason to defer to local democratic processes which are already addressing the question, and the minority to show that a consensus has emerged that post-conviction DNA access is part of our shared understanding of fundamental fairness.
In the end, for five justices, truthseeking was outweighed by the interest in finality of judgments and deference to states. If the 2008-09 term is any indication, the Court seems inclined to elevate the position of truthseeking relative to individual rights. But the Court is willing to let it take a back seat when it believes that it too severely threatens state prerogatives or the efficiency of the criminal justice system.
July 2, 2009 at 7:55 pm
Tags: Osborne and DNA
Posted in: Criminal Procedure, International & Comparative Law, Supreme Court, Uncategorized
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Criminalizing Matchmaking: Mail Order Marriage Laws
posted by Solangel Maldonado
During his recent appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, actor Alec Baldwin, who has been involved in a bitter custody dispute with his ex-wife for years, offended many people when he said that he would love to have more children and was “thinking about getting a Filipino mail-order bride.” Mr. Baldwin has since apologized for the insensitive comment and admitted that “such anger and frustration about the issue of sex trafficking is understandable.” Admittedly, some mail order marriages are the result of sex trafficking, but does this mean that countries should criminalize the mail order marriage industry as the Philippines has done?
The Philippines has two statutes addressing mail order marriages. Republic Act No. 6955, enacted in 1990, makes it a crime for any person to ”carry on a business which has its purpose the matching of Filipino women for marriage to foreign nationals either on a mail-order basis or through personal introduction.” The penalty for violation of the Act is a minimum six years imprisonment. In addition, if the offender is a foreigner, he will be deported (after serving his sentence) and permanently banned from Philippines.
In 2003, the Philippines enacted the Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act,which, among other things, makes it illegal “To introduce or match for money, profit, or material, economic or other consideration . . . any Filipino woman to a foreign national, for marriage for the purpose of acquiring, buying, offering, selling or trading him/her to engage in prostitution, pornography, sexual exploitation, forced labor, slavery, involuntary servitude or debt bondage.” The penalty for violation of the Anti-Trafficking Act is 20 years imprisonment and a minimum fine of one million pesos.
Despite these laws, the mail order bride industry continues to flourish. Experts estimate that one-third to one-half of all foreign fiancees who enter the United States each year met their American husbands-to-be through an international marriage broker. A large majority of the women come from Southeast Asian countries, including the Philippines, and the law has had little effect on international marriage brokers who do a lot of their advertising and matching online. Although the United States also has laws regulating the mail order bride industry, some commentators argue that these marriages exacerbate gender, race, and class inequalities and thus, the United States should follow the Philippines’ approach. Thoughts?
June 10, 2009 at 8:35 am
Posted in: Family Law, International & Comparative Law
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Twenty Years Later
posted by Gerard Magliocca
This is the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. As the Co-Director of IU-Indy’s China Summer Program, I’ve spent quite a bit of time in China over the last seven years. I am not a China expert, but I do know more about legal reform there than the average bear. So I thought I would try to provide some perspective on where things stand.
It is fair to say that individual freedom has increased for the average citizen so long as they are: (1) Han Chinese; (2) not that religious; (3) not interested in joining the Falun Gong or any other civil organization that rivals the Communist Party; and (4) not a lawyer bringing cases against state action.
June 4, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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Indicating Gender — Status
posted by Naomi Cahn
This post is prompted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales’s discussion of the recent OECD Social Institutions and Gender Index. In her very thoughtful post – with which I entirely agree — she discusses the problems of “empirically measuring and ranking intangible phenomena such as social norms,” And she notes that the OECD publication was not entirely successful.But at least it tried.
In conjunction with a recent conference on state security in Norway, I examined six reports on state weakness to determine their approach to the use of gender equality as an indicator of state fragility or failure. These six reports were issued between 2005-2008 by highly influential U.S. foreign policy institutions, including private and public agencies, and one of them was co-authored by Susan Rice (before she became our Ambassador to the UN). While measures of gender equity are included in other assessments, such as the OECD’s index, the UNDP’s Human Development Report , or Freedom House’s evaluation of global freedom, this simply shows the integration of gender into development or civil liberties markers; these assessments are not self-conscious analyses of state security and fragility, unlike the 6 reports I examined. Apart from the USAID report, the other 5 reports did not use gender as an assessment tool.
Indicators and assessment tools can be important components in establishing state policies and practices towards developing countries. Consequently, the components that comprise each of these evaluative efforts are signs of what is considered critical to ensuring state stability. Donor agencies are increasingly using various indicators to help them evaluate country performance in order to ensure that their resources will be used most efficiently and effectively. While indicators are imperfect – they are subject to errors in measurement, and they take thin slices of complex issues — they are useful, within these limitations, for providing broad-brush pictures of a country’s status. But not if they don’t include gender at all. Gender equity provides a useful measurement of state security, as Fionnuala Ni Aolain, Dina Haynes, and I argue in our forthcoming book. Nonetheless, its significance is virtually unrecognized in numerous evaluations of state fragility, thereby leading to the risk that gender will remain unrecognized in efforts to promote state stability.
May 23, 2009 at 7:10 pm
Tags: gender, state fragility
Posted in: Feminism and Gender, International & Comparative Law
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Pirates in International Law
posted by Dave Hoffman
Over at Opinio Juris, Duncan Hollis has a must read post.
April 22, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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Update on torture prosecutions
posted by Sonja Starr
Quick update: President Obama has now announced that he has not ruled out prosecuting the architects of the Bush Administration’s torture policy. While this announcement is technically consistent with his statement last Thursday (which promised only that the actual CIA interrogators would not be prosecuted), the President appears to be backpedalling from his broader suggestion that it’s time to move on rather than seek “retribution.” I think this is a positive development–as I explained in my Friday post, given that there is fairly strong reason to believe that torture occurred, the Convention Against Torture clearly obligates the United States to undertake a serious criminal investigation and to bring appropriate prosecutions if the evidence supports it.
April 21, 2009 at 6:10 pm
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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Torture and “laying blame for the past”
posted by Sonja Starr
On Thursday, the Obama administration released several of OLC’s notorious, but previously classified, memos on so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. President Obama made a statement decrying the techniques at issue but offering assurance to “those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.” This promise appears to be directed at the CIA interrogators themselves, not at the lawyers who drafted the memos or the policymakers who ultimately called the shots. Still, a passage near the end of Obama’s statement suggests that the administration’s not planning to charge anybody, period. He stated:
“This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America’s ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.”
This is a poetic passage, but is it right? The United States is party to a treaty (the Convention Against Torture ) that unambiguously requires it to take suspected torturers (or those complicit in torture) into custody and either extradite them or “submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.” Now, Obama did not use the word “torture” in his statement, which was surely not an accidental omission—but his AG did explicitly state that waterboarding was torture in his confirmation hearings, and Obama presumably condemned these memos because he disagrees with their legal conclusion that none of the disputed techniques constituted torture. Let’s assume arguendo, then, that torture took place.
April 17, 2009 at 5:16 am
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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Solitary Confinement: Possibly Torture, Definitely Hell
posted by Sonja Starr
Thanks very much to Danielle for her kind introduction, and to her and Dan for inviting me to participate in this blog. This is my inaugural blogging experience, and I’m (somewhat nervously) looking forward to it! Let me start with a brief comment on the story on solitary confinement by Atul Gawande in this past week’s New Yorker. Solitary confinement is practiced on quite a large scale in the United States, especially with the rise of supermax prisons over the past ten or twenty years. Gawande argues that solitary confinement essentially destroys prisoners’ brains. Humans are extremely social animals, and absent regular interaction, our minds deteriorate rapidly and to a surprising degree. Among people detained alone for extended periods, depression and misery are universal, and psychotic breaks are fairly common. Many prisoners of war describe solitary confinement as a worse experience than physical torture. Some prisoners more or less recover after return to ordinary prison or to society; others never do. A number of legal scholars have made similar arguments, and in fact the extreme psychological harm done by solitary confinement was recognized over a century ago by the Supreme Court in In re Medley, 134 U.S. 160 (1890).
Gawande’s article’s subtitle asks: “Is this torture?” Let me assume for a moment that Gawande, who pushes the torture comparison in the body of the piece as well, means that as a serious legal question. The question isn’t frivolous. The answer isn’t a categorical “yes,” but it’s probably not a categorical “no” either–it is plausible that some cases of solitary confinement in the U.S. might qualify as torture under international law. The leading formulation, in the Convention Against Torture, defines torture as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted” for certain specified purposes, including punishment. Domestic and international courts have generally interpreted the severity requirement fairly strictly (though not as strictly as some recent US officials have done, to be sure), though certainly the dire picture that Gawande paints suggests that at least some instances of solitary confinement might qualify as severe mental suffering.
April 1, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, International & Comparative Law
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Bring on the Deans!
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
With Yale Law Dean Harold Koh’s nomination as State Department Legal Adviser, the Obama administration has tapped the deans of the country’s top two law schools, and is populated by numerous law professors, including, of course, the president himself. There’s nothing new in that observation, but it was still of interest to a European law professor who was visiting Temple Law School yesterday. In his country, there’s no such intermingling between academia and government — the executive bureaucracy remains in place regardless of electoral outcomes; a new political party in power leads to change at the very top but otherwise few shifts occur. Though there may be some efficiency benefits to a permanent bureaucracy, I can’t say that I see much more to recommend it, and nor could our guest. While permanent executive officers would develop significant expertise in the subject area relevant to their post, I can’t imagine that luminaries such as Koh and Kagan, with not only deep knowledge but also serious candle-power, would migrate in large numbers to such positions. A permanent bureaucracy might result in increased ideological stability, without the migration between the left and the right that we see in the U.S., but I query whether this outcome is possible (can permanency eliminate political inclinations or does it simply entrench them?) or even desirable. At least in our system of government, the executive branch should be responsive to the will of the people, and the cyclical shifts in ideological inclinations help to moderate extreme influences on both sides of the political spectrum. As long as excellence and experience, rather than ideology, are the central rationales for selection of political appointees, these swings should improve governance in the long run, by bringing in fresh ideas and new perspectives every four to eight years. So bring on the deans, I say — our government will be a richer place for it.
March 25, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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International Child Abductions and Children’s Best Interests
posted by Solangel Maldonado
Some of my family law students have been following the international custody case involving Brazil and the United States. According to David Goldman, a New Jersey resident, in June 2004, his wife took their four year-old son, Sean, to Brazil on vacation where he was supposed to join them a week later. However, a few days after arriving in Brazil, his wife informed him she was divorcing him and would remain in Brazil with their son. This case is not unique. Thousands of parents each year remove children from their country of residence and retain them in another country without the other parent’s consent, in breach of the other parent’s custodial rights. Lawmakers around the world have long known that international child abduction by a parent is a serious problem and have attempted to create a mechanism to ensure that children are returned to their country of residence. Under the 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, ratified by 68 nations, the signatory countries agree to promptly return a child who has been wrongfully removed to or retained in another signatory country.
Unfortunately, the Hague’s procedural mechanisms do not always work for two reasons. First, courts do not always comply with the Hague and second, even when they do, abducting parents sometimes go into hiding with the child and cannot be found. The retaining country and its law enforcement officials often make little effort to find the child.
March 16, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Posted in: Family Law, International & Comparative Law
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Auf Wiedersehen E-Voting Machines
posted by Danielle Citron
It appears that Germany is saying goodbye to its computerized voting machines, at least for now. Germany’s highest court declared unconstitutional the country’s use of e-voting machines in the 2005 elections, the country’s first large-scale deployment of the technology. According to Constitutional judge Andreas Vosskuhle, the judgment did not rule out digital voting in the future, but instead made clear that the equipment used four years ago had problems that warranted the ruling. The court nonetheless upheld the result of that election because plaintiffs had no direct proof that the machines produced errors. In September, Germany will return to a paper-and-pencil election.
The suit that promted the ruling was brought by political scientist Joachim Wiesner and his son, physicist Ulrich Wiesner. The father-and-son team argued that e-voting machines’ opacity prevented voters from seeing what actually happened to their votes inside the computers, rendering it unconstitutional to put “blind faith” in the technology. They also emphasized the security risks that inhere in e-voting systems.
Germany joins the Dutch government in abolishing e-voting. In 2008, the Dutch government went a bit further, decertifying the existing paperless systems and rejecting a proposal to develop a new generation of voting computers. In the United States, while a plethora of well-regarded technologists decry the use of touchscreen e-voting systems, both for their risk of inaccuracy and for their lack of security, many states remain firmly committed to our e-voting systems. This move might ask us to consider whether other countries have a higher regard for the accuracy and security of voting than we do.
March 3, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Posted in: Administrative Law, International & Comparative Law, Technology
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Empiricizing Transitional Justice
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
The Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley released this month “a population-based survey on attitudes about social reconciliation and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia” entitled So We Will Never Forget. Of the several surveys of the Cambodian public on accountability for the Khmer Rouge that have been completed in the past decade (including one by yours truly), this is the most scientifically planned and executed, with rigorous methodology and a wide sampling of the Cambodian population.
There’s much of interest in this report for those participating in accountability efforts. First, the report underscores the need for a serious public education effort around the tribunal. Of the respondents who did not live under the Khmer Rouge regime, 81% described their knowledge of that period as poor or very poor. Given that 68% of Cambodia’s population has been born since the Khmer Rouge left power, that’s a very concerning statistic. Moreover, 39% of those surveyed had no knowledge of the Extraordinary Chambers and 46% had only limited knowledge. The court and non-governmental organizations have a great deal of headway to make in educating the Cambodian public about the ECCC and the Khmer Rouge era.
January 30, 2009 at 8:30 am
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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Courting Genocide?
posted by Jaya Ramji-Nogales
This week, Peter Spiro and I hosted Jide Nzelibe at Temple’s International Law Colloquium. Jide presented his work-in-progress, Courting Genocide: The Unintended Effects of Humanitarian Intervention, on which Kristen Boon provided commentary. While I had several smaller quibbles and a few larger criticisms of the paper, it moves the scholarship on humanitarian intervention a step forward, as Kristen noted, by examining the motivations of all of the actors involved and suggesting that the effects of humanitarian intervention may not always be benign. Jide’s basic thesis is as follows:
because humanitarian interventions tend to increase the chance that rebel or victim group leaders are going to achieve their preferred political objectives, such leaders might have an incentive to engage in the kinds of provocative actions that make atrocities against their followers more likely in the first place
January 23, 2009 at 7:00 am
Posted in: International & Comparative Law
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