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Half-century on, “LBJ” podcast’s a good listen on US-Vietnam War

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Anyone interested in exploring, at this half-century mark, the conflict waged on a then-partitioned Southeast Asian coastal land, Vietnam, ought not to stop at the 2017 televised PBS series. Also meriting attention is a less heralded, but entirely worthwhile Public Radio International podcast.

Called “LBJ’s War”, this multi-part podcast focuses on Executive Branch machinations after the United States became involved, siding with the South (Republic of Vietnam) against the North (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) – and against the Viet Cong, an armed ally of the North that operated in the South.

It begins in the fall of 1963, when Lyndon Baines Johnson assumed the U.S. Presidency after the November 22 assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, and soon confronted the question of whether to continue support for South Vietnam, where the incumbent President, Ngo Dinh Diem, himself had been assassinated on November 2. It ends 5 years later – well before the last Americans fled as Saigon fell, but after Johnson’s surprise March 1968 announcement that he would not seek another presidential term.

Most notable is the way that the podcast recounts these and other key events (including, of course, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the 1968 Tet Offensive). As much as possible, it uses words spoken on cables, in taped phone calls and conversations, and, in the case of Lady Bird Johnson, entries in an audio-recorded diary. Coming to life are her voice, that of her husband, and those of others – among them two Georgians, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

Well worth a listen.

(credit for photo captioned “President Lyndon B. Johnson awards the Distinguished Service Cross to First Lieutenant Marty A. Hammer”)

Honored to contribute to new anthology, “Human Rights and Children”

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Honored to be a contributor to Human Rights and Children, an anthology of works in the field edited by Hofstra Law Professor Barbara Stark.

The collection’s just been issued by Edward Elgar Publishing, which writes:

“This volume provides a comprehensive overview of children’s human rights, collecting the works of leading authorities as well as new scholars grappling with emerging ideas of ‘children’ and ‘rights.’ Beginning with the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world, this book explores the theory, doctrine, and implementation of the legal frameworks addressing child labor, child soldiers, and child trafficking, as well as children’s socio-economic rights, including their rights to education.”

My own contribution is listed in this compendium as: “Diane Marie Amann (2013), ‘A Review of Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy in Mark A. Drumbl, Oxford University Press’, American Journal of International Law…” On my SSRN page, I describe this book review as follows:

“This essay reviews ‘Reimagining Child Soldiers in International Law and Policy’ (2012), in which author Mark Drumbl examines legal doctrine, global activism, and social science research respecting underaged combatants.”

Additional contributors to this collection, besides Professor Stark and me: Philip Alston, Jo Becker, Maria Bouverne-De Bie, Claire Breen, Geert Cappelaere, Cynthia Price Cohen, Katherine Covell, Mac Darrow, Martha F. Davis, Michael J. Dennis, Janelle M. Diller, Sara A. Dillon, Mark A. Drumbl, Nienke Grossman, Martin Guggenheim, Stuart N. Hart, Kamran Hashemi, R. Brian Howe, David A. Levy, Janet McKnight, Tendai Charity Nhenga-Chakarisa, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, Roslyn Powell, Alison Dundes Renteln, Marilia Sardenberg, William A. Schabas, David M. Smolin, Murray A. Straus, Laura Thetaz-Bergman, John Tobin, Jonathan Todres, Geraldine Van Bueren, Wouter Vandenhole, Eugeen Verhellen, and Barbara Bennett Woodhouse.

Reading “Retreat of Western Liberalism” a half-year on

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Last autumn a colleague recommended The Retreat of Western Liberalism by Edward Luce. I finally got ’round to reading it about 6 months after its June 2017 release, over winter break.

It begins by recounting Luce’s impulse roadtrip in 1989, joining Oxford friends in tearing down the Berlin Wall. It proceeds to survey trends scholars have been discussing for at least a decade – and then, as one might say, the book adds Trump and mixes. The result is a series of aphorisms and anecdotes; an example:

“In Moscow’s view, history is back and nothing is inevitable, least of all liberal democracy.”

Yet just a half-year later, events point to things missing from this mid-2017 account.

One is consideration of how voters would react to the current U.S. administration; that is, whether the ballot box might stymie the very forces it unleashed with the presidential election of November 8, 2016. (This omission surprises, given that as early as April 2017, a Democratic candidate had made a strong showing in a highly publicized Georgia congressional race.) Since Retreat was published, Republicans have lost a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, along with other races, including 2 presumed GOP-safe statehouse seats in my own Georgia county. If results like these turn out to be bellwethers for the November 2018 midterms – and if newly elected leaders then work to recalibrate the policy agenda – at least some of the governance alarms raised in Retreat will seem less well-founded.

Another is discussion of sex and gender as pieces of the geopolitical puzzle. Nearly all the anecdotes related, and nearly all the sources cited, are male or pertain to men. Exceptions are critiques of the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and of the United Kingdom’s post-Brexit PM, Teresa May, plus comments on Germany by reference to Angela Merkel. All 3 are women, of course, yet neither the subject’s sex nor the gendered nature of politics figures into these analyses. The January 21, 2017, global Women’s Marches suggested a need for more attention to sex-gender dynamics, and events in the second half of last year, signaled by #MeToo and #Time’sUp, confirm it.

Perhaps the pretermission is due to the book’s rather strict construction of “Western liberalism,” as  centered on the freedom of the individual. That framing of liberty may incur tension with views of equality that take into account an individual’s  membership in a group. The book evinces discomfort with attention to such membership by reference to “identity politics,” on the one hand, and color-lined “nationalism,” on the other. The excesses of both are indeed complications. But they exist. Better to explore reconciliation of liberty-equality tensions, as another commentator recently did, than only to decry manifestations of excess.

All this is not to say that the book’s structural observations are to be disregarded. To the contrary:

Its concern that elites have overstated the Western liberal solution is correct. The same may not be said of the book’s prescription of listening more to persons who voted for the current president, at least not if “listening” refers to myriad of 2017 articles presenting anecdotal interviews with such voters. Listening in a more statistically grounded manner well may be in order.

Also correct is the book’s concern that as political and economic power shifts east, to Asia, the West ought to recognize, to think, and to act more strategically in response to that shift. Its positing of a standoff between liberal India and illiberal China –

“… Divided by the Himalayas, the world’s two largest countries, China and India, sit side by side – one an autocracy, the other a democracy. …”

– is not immediately persuasive, yet merits further pondering.

In short, Luce’s observations offer a basis on which to continue to make sense of our present and future:

“We must think more radically than that.”

Luce pushes us, and for this, his book is a worthwhile read.

Fitting tribute for Georgia Law Professor Louis B. Sohn (1914-2006): conference and plaque in Lviv, city of his birth

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Since arriving at the University of Georgia School of Law in 2011, I have had the very great honor of holding the Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law – a chair established decades ago to welcome the renowned international lawyer and academic, Louis B. Sohn (prior posts). Professor Sohn’s record of achievement as an author and teacher, and his public service as well, is an inspiration. Indeed, his oil portrait greets me whenever I step a few doors from my office and into the Louis B. Sohn Library on International Relations, both situated in our law school’s Dean Rusk International Law Center.

Peter Trooboff, Senior Counsel at Covington & Burling, Washington, D.C., and former President of the American Society of International Law, speaks at the ceremony unveiling Sohn’s plaque, affixed to a building in Lviv where Sohn once lived. Thanks for this photo due to ASIL President-Elect Sean Murphy, who attended the ceremony along with Trooboff and another former ASIL President, Lori Fisler Damrosch.

I was thus very pleased to contribute, along with many others (including some of my Georgia Law colleagues), to the recent commemoration of Professor Sohn in the city of his birth: Lviv, Ukraine, known as Lwów, or Lemberg, and located in Poland, when he was born there on March 1, 1914. As detailed in Philippe Sands‘ masterful 2016 book, East West Street, the city was home not only to Sohn, but also to two other 20th C. giants of international law, Hersh Lauterpacht (1897-1960) and Raphael Lemkin (1914-2006).

The commemoration took place last November in Lviv. Featured were a workshop and conference, a multimedia art performance, and the unveiling of 3 plaques, each honoring one of these sons of Lviv.

Sohn’s plaque, depicted below, includes a photo, short bio, and 1981 quote of Sohn, in two languages/alphabets. The English version says:

Louis B. Sohn

1914-2006 Lemberg/Lwów-Washington, D.C.

graduate of law faculty and diplomatic science of Jan Kazimierz University (now Lviv University); renowned international lawer, professor at Harvard University, University of Georgia and George Washington University; President, American Society of International Law (1988-1990); participant in drafting the United Nations Charter and the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea

To deny the existence of an international law of human rights at this time is no longer defensible (1981)

1932-1935 Lived in this building

This plaque has been made possible with the support of the City of Lviv, the Center for Urban History, family, friends and colleagues

Important essays on myriad international law subfields in our new OUP book, “Arcs of Global Justice: Essays in Honour of William A. Schabas”

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LONDON – Building on yesterday’s post about the magical London conference launching Arcs of Global Justice: Essays in Honour of William A. Schabas (Margaret M. deGuzman and Diane Marie Amann eds.), today’s post profiles the book itself, which, thanks to excellent assistance from John Louth, Blake Ratcliff, and their staff, has just been published by Oxford University Press. (The hardback may be ordered via OUP or Amazon, and the book’s also available on Kindle.)

Very pleased to have coedited this volume with my colleague Meg. The concept, in our words:

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said ‘the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ Testing the optimism of that claim were the many fits and starts in the struggle for human rights that King helped to catalyze. The same is true of other events in the last half-century, from resistance to apartheid and genocide to equal and fair treatment in domestic criminal justice systems, to the formation of entities to prevent atrocities and to bring their perpetrators to justice. Within this display of myriad arcs may be found the many persons who helped shape this half-century of global justice-and prominent among them is William A. Schabas. His panoramic scholarship includes dozens of books and hundreds of articles, and he also has served as an influential policymaker, advocate, and mentor.

This work honours William A. Schabas and his career with essays by luminary scholars and jurists from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The essays examine contemporary, historical, cultural, and theoretical aspects of the many arcs of global justice with which Professor Schabas has engaged, in fields including public international law, human rights, transitional justice, international criminal law, and capital punishment.

In all, the book includes 29 contributions by 35 academics, advocates, and jurists, as detailed in the table of contents below. Providing jacket-cover testimonials were Steven Kay QC, Philippe Sands QC, Professor and former Ambassador David Scheffer, and Judge Christine Van den Wyngaert. We hope that you’ll follow their recommendations and give these important, substantive essays a very good read.

Arcs of Global Justice:
Essays in Honour of William A. Schabas

► Foreword by Diane Marie Amann and Margaret M. deGuzman, coeditors
► Introduction: William Schabas: Portrait of a Scholar/Activist Extraordinaire by Roger S. Clark, Board of Governors Professor of Law, Rutgers University School of Law

Human Rights
► Human Rights and International Criminal Justice in the Twenty First Century: The End of the Post-WWII Phase and the Beginning of an Uncertain New Era by M. Cherif Bassiouni (He died at age 79 in September, just weeks after he completed final changes on this essay; as posted, our conference included a memorial to him. At the time of his death, he was Emeritus Professor of Law, DePaul University College of Law; Honorary President, Siracusa Institute for Criminal Justice and Human Rights; and Honorary President, L’Association internationale de droit pénal.)
► William Schabas, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and International Human Rights Law by Justice Thomas A. Cromwell, Supreme Court of Canada, and Bruno Gélinas-Faucher, formerly a law clerk on that court and now a Cambridge PhD candidate
► The International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, as a Victim-Oriented Treaty by Emmanuel Decaux, Professor Emeritus, Université Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas), and former President, Committee on Enforced Disappearances
► The Politics of Sectarianism and its Reflection in Questions of International Law & State Formation in The Middle East by Kathleen Cavanaugh, Senior Lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway, and  Joshua Castellino, Professor of Law & Dean of the School of Law, as well as the Business School, at Middlesex University, London

Capital Punishment
► International Law and the Death Penalty: A Toothless Tiger, or a Meaningful Force for Change? by Sandra L. Babcock, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and Faculty Director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide
► The UN Optional Protocol on the Abolition of the Death Penalty by Marc Bossuyt, Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Emeritus Professor of the University of Antwerp, Emeritus President of the Constitutional Court of Belgium, and former Chairman of the UN Commission on Human Rights
► The Right to Life and the Progressive Abolition of the Death Penalty by Christof Heyns, formerly the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions from 2010 through 2016, and now a member of the UN Human Rights Committee and Professor of Human Rights Law at the University of Pretoria, Thomas Probert, Research Associate, Centre of Governance & Human Rights, University of Cambridge, and Tess Borden, Aryeh Neier Fellow at Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union, and former researcher for the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary execution
► Progress and Trend of the Reform of the Death Penalty in China by Zhao Bingzhi, Dean of the College for Criminal Law Science of Beijing Normal University, President of the Criminal Law Research Association of China, Vice-President of the International Association of Penal Law, and President of that association’s Chinese National Group

International Criminal Law
► Criminal Law Philosophy in William Schabas’ Scholarship by Margaret M. deGuzman, Professor of Law at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law
► Is the ICC Focusing too Much on Non-State Actors? by Frédéric Mégret, Associate Professor and Dawson Scholar, Faculty of Law, McGill University
► The Principle of Legality at the Crossroads of Human Rights and International Criminal Law by Shane Darcy, Senior Lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway
► Revisiting the Sources of Applicable Law Before the ICC by Alain Pellet, Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris Nanterre, former Chairperson of the UN International Law Commission, President of the French Society for International Law, Member of the Institut de droit international, as well as Counsel and Advocate before the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and other forums
► The ICC as a Work in Progress, for a World in Process by Mireille Delmas-Marty, Member, Institut de France, and Professor Emerita, Collège de France de Paris
► Legacy in International Criminal Justice by Carsten Stahn, Professor of International Criminal Law and Global Justice, Leiden University
► Torture by Private Actors and ‘Gold Plating’ the Offence in National Law: An Exchange of Emails in Honour of William Schabas by Andrew Clapham, Professor of Public International Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, and Paola Gaeta, Professor of International Law and International Criminal Law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva

Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity
► Secrets and Surprises in the Travaux Préparatoires of the Genocide Convention by Hirad Abtahi, First Legal Adviser, Head of the Legal and Enforcement Unit, at the Presidency of the International Criminal Court, and Philippa Webb, Reader (Associate Professor) in Public International Law at King’s College London and a barrister at 20 Essex Street Chambers
► Perspectives on Cultural Genocide: From Criminal Law to Cultural Diversity by Jérémie Gilbert, Professor of International and Comparative Law, University of East London
► Crimes Against Humanity: Repairing Title 18’s Blind Spots by Beth Van Schaack, Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School and Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Security & Cooperation at Stanford University
► A New Global Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity: Future Prospects by Leila Nadya Sadat, James Carr Professor of International Criminal Law and Director of the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute at Washington University School of Law, Special Adviser to the ICC Prosecutor on Crimes Against Humanity, and Director of the Crimes Against Humanity Initiative

Transitional Justice and Atrocity Prevention
► Justice Outside of Criminal Courtrooms and Jailhouses by Mark A. Drumbl, Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law and Director, Transnational Law Institute, Washington and Lee University School of Law
► Toward Greater Synergy between Courts and Truth Commissions in Post-Conflict Contexts: Lessons from Sierra Leone by Charles Chernor Jalloh, Professor of Law, Florida International University, and a member of the International Law Commission
► International Criminal Tribunals and Cooperation with States: Serbia and the provision of evidence for the Slobodan Milosevic Trial at the ICTY by Geoffrey Nice QC, a barrister since 1971, formerly at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and Nevenka Tromp, Lecturer in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam and former member of the ICTY Leadership Research Team
► The Arc toward Justice and Peace by Mary Ellen O’Connell, the Robert and Marion Short Chair in Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School
► The Maintenance of International Peace and Security through Prevention of Atrocity Crimes: The Question of Co-operation between the UN and regional Arrangements by Adama Dieng, UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, as well as former Registrar of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and former Secretary-General of the International Commission of Jurists

Justice in Culture and Practice
► Law and Film: Curating Rights Cinema by Emma Sandon, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Research Fellow to the Chair for Social Change, University of Johannesburg
► The Role of Advocates in Developing International Law by Wayne Jordash QC, international human rights and humanitarian lawyer and founding partner of Global Rights Compliance
► Bill the Blogger by Diane Marie Amann, Emily and Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law

Optimism about “Arcs of Global Justice” at London launch of our OUP essay collection honouring William A. Schabas

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LONDON – “Optimism” was the byword for Friday’s magical conference launching Arcs of Global Justice: Essays in Honour of William A. Schabas, the just-published Oxford University Press collection coedited by Margaret M. deGuzman and myself.

The event took place in a Christmas-tree-lighted conference room at 9 Bedford Row, the London chambers where our honouree, Bill Schabas (above center), is a door tenant. Joining Bill and his wife, Penelope Soteriou, were several of the 35 women and men whose 29 contributions comprise the volume, many friends, colleagues, PhD students, and relatives.

Gillian Higgins (left), Head of the International Practice Group at 9 Bedford Row, opened with a warm message of welcome and congratulations. Then followed a celebration that combined lighthearted anecdotes with serious presentations of scholarship. Topics ranged as far and wide as Schabas’ multifaceted career, which includes current appointments as Professor of International Law at Middlesex University, London, Professor of International Criminal Law and Human Rights at Leiden University, and Emeritus Professor of Human Rights Law and Honorary Chairman of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway; service as a member of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission and as a consultant on capital punishment for the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime; and authorship of hundreds of books, chapters, and articles.

A sobering moment came in Birkbeck Lecturer Emma Sandon‘s discussion of Schabas’ role as an organizer of and speaker at human rights film festivals. Sandon (above) concluded with a clip from Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). All fell silent while watching the characters in the video courtroom watch actual footage from the Allied liberations of concentration camps like Buchenwald.

Also moving was the memorial that Northwestern University Law Professor David Scheffer gave on behalf of contributor Cherif Bassiouni, who died at age 79 in September, not long after finishing his chapter, entitled “Human Rights and International Criminal Justice in the Twenty-First Century: The End of the Post-WWII Phase and the Beginning of an Uncertain New Era.” (Bassiouni also penned a dedication for our conference programme, available in PDF here.) Scheffer described the essay in light of his own and Schabas’ writings, and concluded on a optimistic note regarding the future of human rights.

That same note sounded in Schabas’ own interventions throughout the day. On issues ranging from the International Criminal Court to abolition of the death penalty, he assured his audience that even in these times, when the day-to-day “weather” may seem grim, the overall “climate” offers much room for optimism.

Here’s order of the day (full PDF programme here; additional contributors in attendance included Middlesex Law Dean Joshua Castellino and Cambridge PhD candidate Bruno Gélinas-Faucher):

Arcs of Global Justice:
Conference Launching Essay Collection in Honour of William A. Schabas
Friday, 8 December 2017, 9 Bedford Row, London

Opening
“Welcome” by Gillian Higgins, Head of the International Practice Group at 9 Bedford Row
“In Memoriam for Cherif Bassiouni” by David Scheffer, Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Law and Director of the Center for International Human Rights at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, Chicago
“Introduction to Arcs of Global Justice” by coeditors Diane Marie Amann and Margaret M. deGuzman

International Law & Criminal Justice
“The Principle of Legality at the Crossroads of Human Rights & International Criminal Law” by Shane Darcy, Senior Lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway
“Criminal Law Philosophy in William Schabas’s Scholarship” by Margaret M. deGuzman, Professor of Law at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law
“Perspectives on Cultural Genocide: From Criminal Law to Cultural Diversity” by Jérémie Gilbert, Professor of International and Comparative Law, University of East London
“Toward Greater Synergy between Courts & Truth Commissions in Post-Conflict Context: Lessons from Sierra Leone” by Charles Chernor Jalloh, Professor of Law, Florida International University, and a member of the International Law Commission
Moderator: Kathleen Cavanaugh, Senior Lecturer at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway

Justice / Scholarship / Culture / Practice
“Bill the Blogger” by Diane Marie Amann, Emily and Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at the University of Georgia School of Law
“Advocates, Scholars & Maintaining the International Criminal Law Momentum” by Wayne Jordash QC, international human rights and humanitarian lawyer and founding partner of Global Rights Compliance
“Law & Film: Curating Rights Cinema” by Emma Sandon, Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Research Fellow to the Chair for Social Change, University of Johannesburg
Moderator: Michelle Farrell, Senior Lecturer in Law in the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool

Abolition of the Death Penalty
“International Law & the Death Penalty: A Toothless Tiger, or a Meaningful Force for Change?” by Sandra L. Babcock, Clinical Professor of Law at Cornell Law School and Faculty Director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide
The Right to Life & the Progressive Abolition of the Death Penalty by Thomas Probert, Research Associate, Centre of Governance & Human Rights, University of Cambridge (on behalf of himself & co-authors Christof Heyns & Tess Borden)
Moderator: Jon Yorke, Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Centre for Human Rights at Birmingham City School of Law

Closing
Introduction by John Louth, Editor-in-Chief of Academic Law at Oxford University Press
Remarks by William A. Schabas OC MRIA

Reception

With thanks to our host, 9 Bedford Row, & cosponsor, Oxford University Press

◊ ◊ ◊

Tomorrow’s post: Details on Arcs of Justice: Essays in Honour of William A. Schabas (Margaret M. deGuzman and Diane Marie Amann, eds.) (OUP 2018) (The hardback may be ordered via OUP or Amazon, and the book’s also available on Kindle.)

New essay in AJIL, on International Court of Justice nuclear weapons rulings

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Pleased to note my most recent publication, which appears in the latest edition of the American Journal of International Law, in the section that analyzes recent judgments. Entitled “International Decisions: Obligations Concerning Negotiations Relating to Cessation of the Nuclear Arms Race and to Nuclear Disarmament,” it may be found at 111 AJIL 439 (2017).

The essay sets forth key aspects of 3 judgments (available here) that the International Court of Justice issued in October 2016 – as well as the response to those rulings by one party, the United Kingdom. It offers thoughts on potential future nuclear disarmament efforts. (It went to press before adoption of one such effort, the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which at this writing has 3 states parties and 53 signatories, none of them nuclear weapons states.)

My article, which also forms part of Georgia Law’s Dean Rusk International Law Center Research Paper Series at SSRN, may be downloaded at this SSRN link.

Here’s the abstract:

“In a trio of decisions, the International Court of Justice rejected the applications in which the Republic of the Marshall Islands claimed that three large states known to possess nuclear weapons, India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom, had breached their international obligations to undertake and conclude negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament. This essay discusses those decisions, as well as the United Kingdom’s subsequent limitation of the circumstances under which it will accept the ICJ’s jurisdiction over such complaints. This development, coupled with the Court’s own narrowing of circumstances in which such an application will be accepted, make the likelihood of an eventual ruling on the nuclear disarmament issue quite remote.”

Far cry from President Truman’s vision: today’s speech to UN General Assembly

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The U.S. President’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly today sought to draw support from the example of a predecessor, Harry S Truman, who encouraged the founding in 1945 of the United Nations Organization. But on close comparison – that is, analysis more searching than that in a just-published, facile Time account – today’s speech is a far cry from the global vision of Truman era.

“The United Nations represents the idea of a universal morality, superior to the interests of individual nations. Its foundation does not rest upon power or privilege; it rests upon faith. They rest upon the faith of men in human values – upon the belief that men in every land hold the same high ideals and strive toward the same goals for peace and justice.”

So said Truman in 1950 to the General Assembly in New York, delivering the traditional head-of-state speech on behalf of his country.

In the aftermath of World War II – a war that he had brought to a close following the death-in-office of President Franklin D. Roosevelt – Truman pushed for establishment of an international organization that would bring collective security to a world that, then as now, was troubled. His United States hosted the diplomatic conference at which the Charter of the United Nations was adopted on June 26, 1945. That Charter lays out a plan for international regulation of the use of military force – a plan established by, to quote the Charter’s very first words:

“We the peoples of the United Nations determine to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”

U.S. President Harry S Truman addresses 1945 San Francisco Conference to draft the Charter of the United Nations. (credit)

In April 1945, fewer than two weeks after VJ Day, Truman had opened that San Francisco Conference with a speech that placed collective security over the whims of any single country. To quote President Truman:

“The essence of our problem here is to provide sensible machinery for the settlement of disputes among nations. Without this, peace cannot exist. We can no longer permit any nation, or group of nations, to attempt to settle their arguments with bombs and bayonets.”

Five years later, his 1950 address to the General Assembly acknowledged:

“Governments may sometimes falter in their support of the United Nations, but the peoples of the world do not falter.”

By way of example, Truman in 1950 cited the “widespread,” “overwhelming,” and collective efforts of the United Nations to repel the then-recent invasion of South Korea. “In uniting to crush the aggressors in Korea” – note that Truman spoke of crushing aggressors, and not of destroying an entire country – he maintained that countries had “proved that the charter is a living instrument backed by the material and moral strength of members, large and small.”

In the U.S. head of state’s General Assembly speech today, the world heard a very different address, by a very different holder of the office of the U.S. President. Today’s speech referred to Truman and Truman-era policies like the Marshall Plan as purveyors of “three beautiful pillars,” of “sovereignty, security and prosperity.”

It must, however, be noted that no reference to sovereignty or prosperity may be found in the two pivotal Truman speeches. Not one of the three quoted words appears in the speech by which Secretary of State George Marshall announced his eponymous plan, either. Security does receive mention in Truman’s April 1945 speech, but in a global, collective, and cooperative, and not an individual nation-state, sense, as here:

“With firm faith in our hearts, to sustain us along the hard road to victory, we will find our way to a secure peace, for the ultimate benefit of all humanity.”

Truman’s envisagement of “peace, for the ultimate benefit of all humanity” exists worlds away from the enshrinement in today’s speech of individual state sovereignty.

At the centenary of chemical warfare, a visit to Flanders’ World War I battlefields

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YPRES, Belgium – Beautiful vistas and bright sunlight cannot blind the visitor to the pain of this place.

This place is Flanders Fields, the name given to the part of west Belgium, close to the French border, that saw intense battles and horrendous casualties during World War I. This town – Ypres in French and Ieper in Flemish, but called “Wipers” by British WWI soldiers – played a central role. So too nearby Passchendaele/Passendale. Both towns were leveled, and like many in the region, were rebuilt in the old manner after the war ended.

During the war, upwards of half a million persons died in this area alone.

Our visit to Flanders Fields occurred on the 4th of July. Memories linger, and were sparked again by today’s commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 1st large-scale use, in Ypres, of chemical weapons; mustard gas, to be precise. It was the 3d compound to be attempted, after chlorine and phosgene proved less reliable as lethal weapons, according to our tour guide, Raoul Saracen, a retired history teacher. Initial efforts to fight back against chemicals also were crude: before the development and widespread distribution of gas masks, Canadian troops resorted to breathing through kerchiefs soaked in ammonia-rich urine.

The cruelty of chemical warfare did not stop its use. Recording other places where chemicals have been used was a signpost in Langemark, the cemetery where German soldiers (including several with whom I share a surname) are buried. Tokyo, Japan, Halabja, Iraq, and Ghouta, Syria, receive mention, though more recent gassing sites in that last country have yet to be added.

The thousands of headstones in the many Flanders Fields cemeteries of course give pause. So too the cramped trenches, still on display at Sanctuary Wood Museum.

Yet it was a different site that stole my breath – the “dressing station,” a kind of field hospital, at Essex Farm Cemetery. The station’s cement-bunker cells were small, dark, and saddening, a truly concrete reminder of the scourge of war.

 

Comments on yesterday’s Senate hearing with former FBI Director James Comey

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Pleased to have contributed to reporter Sean Illing’s Vox roundups of academic commentary on yesterday’s testimony by former FBI Director James B. Comey before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. (photo credit)

Illing 1st asked whether, in “Comey’s introductory remarks or in his exchanges with senators,” the witness made “a case that President Trump attempted to obstruct justice.” My response here.

Next, he asked about a statement released by the President’s personal lawyer, which said that Comey had engaged in “unauthorized disclosure of privileged information.” My response, which treated the constitutional doctrine of executive privilege, here.