By Otto Spijkers

At the moment, I am in New York, doing a short internship at the Office of Legal Affairs of the United Nations. Apart from the work I do for the Office of Legal Affairs, I also have lunch in the cafeteria of the UN Secretariat, and attend some meetings of the Security Council and the General Assembly (of course, I also have plenty of time, after work and in the weekends, to explore New York, one of the most exciting cities in the world, together with a wonderful group of fellow-interns from all four corners of the world). Today (12 February) I went to a debate on children and armed conflict at the Security Council, and another on climate change, at the General Assembly. In the future I will write more substantive posts, but now I just want to give an impression of what it is like to attend these debates. Of course, I keep in mind what happened to my compatriot, mr. Jan Pronk, former Special Representative of the Secretary General of the United Nations in Sudan, who had to step down when the Sudanese government disapproved of some of the things he wrote on his personal blog and labeled him "an unwelcome person" (or in Latin: a ‘persona non grata’). If you work for the UN (even as an intern?), I guess you have to be careful. Continue reading →

 By Tobias Thienel

A short 47 years, 2 months and 29 days after giving its first ever judgment (Lawless v. Ireland (No. 1)), the European Court of Human Rights has today rendered its first advisory opinion: Advisory Opinion on Certain Legal Questions concerning the Lists of Candidates Submitted with a View to the Election of Judges to the European Court of Human Rights. The question for the Court was only slightly more catchy than the title of the opinion: ‘can a list of candidates for the post of judge at the European Court of Human Rights, which satisfies the criteria listed in Article 21 of the Convention, be refused solely on the basis of gender-related issues?’ In other words, can the equal representation of the genders on the Court be enforced by a refusal to consider nominations that do not contain any women (the gender presently underrepresented), and that accordingly do not afford an opportunity to remedy the situation? Continue reading →

 By Björn Elberling

In the first post, I showed that the general sentencing discount to be achieved by those who plead guilty before the ICTY pleas is not particularly high. I also voiced a suspicion that the discount may be a lot more substantial for high-ranking accused whose statements may be worth more in terms of historiography. This suspicion is confirmed by a look at those few individual judgments in which Trial Chambers did attach numerical values to individual sentencing factors – four of these cases concerned high-ranking political and military leaders. Continue reading →

By Tobias Thienel

Many things of which the state has gained knowledge have always had to be classified as state secrets. Whatever else it may have done, and whatever it may be, the ‘war on terror’ certainly has not led to a decline in that – very far from it, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by. What the ‘war on terror’, with its very much interlocking aspects of national security and criminal law enforcement, arguably has done is to increase the frequency with which secret material, judged sensitive on the grounds of national security, is adduced in evidence in criminal proceedings: see Serrin Turner and Stephen J. Schulhofer, The Secrecy Problem in Terrorist Trials, 2005, p. 9. But not only in criminal trials: if, for instance, measures are taken against a person not in the course of a prosecution, but in the furtherance of public security by the police and other authorities, it may have to be shown in court that this person really is or was a threat to society. What, then, if evidence supporting such a finding is shown to the court, but is kept from the person concerned because it is secret material? Does that violate the right to a fair trial, either at all or even necessarily? I have previously concerned myself with a closely related question in the olden days of The Core, and now gather up the threads, as it were, in the light of recent events. Continue reading →

By Björn Elberling

The first topic I will blog about in some detail, which is a bit of a byproduct of my dissertation, concerns a question of sentencing in international criminal law, namely sentencing in the context of guilty pleas. (The picture to the left shows Stevan Todorovic, one of the first accused to be sentenced after a guilty plea based on a plea agreement) 

Sentencing generally is a very contentious issue, especially for the ICTY, which is often criticized as passing much too lenient sentences – not only, but especially where sentences are the result of a guilty plea based on a plea agreement between prosecutor and accused. The common feeling seems to be that plea bargains have resulted in unduly lenient sentences, that truth and justice have been traded away in return for savings in time and judicial resources, to the detriment of the Tribunals’ legitimacy.

I will try to find out to what extent this is actually the case.

Continue reading →

By Otto Spijkers

On 6 November 2007, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxime Verhagen, presented his new policy, entitled A life of human dignity for all: A human rights strategy for foreign policy. An English summary is available here; the entire report, which is in Dutch, can be found here. The goal of the strategy is ‘comprehensive and ambitious’, and it is, quite simply, ‘to protect and promote human rights throughout the world.’ Four key themes are highlighted:

(1) the universality of human rights;

(2) the relationship between human rights and peace and security;

(3) the indivisibility of human rights; and

(4) the voice of human rights.

Continue reading →

By Nick Li

Yesterday I finally got a chance to see what waterboarding actually looks like when CNN aired part of this video by journalist Kaj Larsen. Now this practice certainly violates article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention – whether or not we would call it "torture" or merely "cruel treatment" or "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment" is irrelevant from this point of view. Continue reading →

By Otto Spijkers

Last week, Mr. Vuk Jeremic, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Serbia, came to Leiden University to speak, among other things, about the future of Kosovo and the importance of the deadline of 10 December 2007. Continue reading →