Tag: France

Honored to present on sovereignties, Nuremberg woman in superb online Global History seminar, still under way

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What an honor to present my work in progress, “Intersectional Sovereignties: Dr. Aline Chalufour, Woman at Nuremberg – and at Paris, Ottawa, and Dalat” last week in “Global History and International Law”, a months-long seminar under way online.

Organizer of this superb scholarly offering is Dr. Anne-Sophie Schoepfel of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris, better known as SciencesPo. Her affiliation struck me as serendipitous, given that the subject of my paper was a graduate of SciencesPo. Born in 1899, Chalufour was also the 6th woman ever to earn a Ph.D. in international law from the University of Paris. In 1945-1946, she was the only woman lawyer on the French team that joined U.S., British, and Soviet allies in prosecuting vanquished Nazi leaders at Nuremberg.

Chalufour is one of the women on whom I’m focusing in my book-length study of women’s roles at that first Nuremberg trial, before the International Military Tribunal. But the richness of her experiences inspired this separate article.

Among the other highlights in Chalufour’s 90-year life: practice before the Paris Bar; activism in national and international feminist groups; teaching at colonial schools in what’s now Vietnam; serving de Gaulle’s Fighting French as a propagandist in Canada; gathering evidence about war crimes from liberated ex-detainees; taking part as the only French prosecutor in Britain’s first trial on Ravensbrück, a Nazi concentration camp for women; and, starting a few years after Nuremberg, service as a national judge.

My paper considers these episodes in light of of 3 theorizations: 1st, the shared sovereignty of the post-World War periods; 2d, sovereignty dynamics in colonial and imperial sites; and 3d, sovereignties of the person, imagined and corporeal. The paper then examines interrelations among these 3.

Serving as my discussant at last Wednesday’s session was Dr. George Giannakopoulos of King’s College London and NYU London. Numerous other participants offered valuable comments.

This was the 5th session in the seminar, which is slated to run through June 24 and has attracted law and history scholars from Asia and Latin America as well as Europe and North America. Next up, at 3 pm EDT this Wednesday, May 20, are 2 papers within the umbrella theme “Imperial Origins of the World Order”; details here.

What’s more, in due course Dr. Schoepfel and her SciencesPo colleagues are posting edited podcasts of each session. (Update: My own presentation is available at the seminar website and on YouTube.)

Already available at the seminar’s website and its YouTube channel:

  • “Epistemic Communities in Exile: Coining ‘Crimes against Humanity’ at London, 1940-45” by Dr. Kerstin von Lingen of the University of Vienna, Austria and author of a new journal article on this subject, as well as ‘Crimes against Humanity’. Eine Ideengeschichte der Zivilisierung von Kriegsgewalt 1864-1945 (Paderborn 2018), a monograph soon to be available in English. Discussants were Dr. Barak Kushner of the University of Cambridge, England, and Dr. Sabina Ferhadbegović of Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena, Germany.
  • “Genocide in Historical Perspective. The Language of Trangression” by Dr. Dirk Moses, of the University of Sydney, Australia, and author of The Problems of Genocide. Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (forthcoming Cambridge University Press). Discussant was Dr. Charles Maier of Harvard University.
  • “The Nuremberg Moment. International Trial, American Lawyers and the Racial Question” by Dr. Guillaume Mouralis of Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin, and author of Le Moment Nuremberg. Le procès international, les lawyers et la question raciale (Presses de Sciences Po 2019). Discussant was Dr. Elizabeth Borgwardt of Washington University in St. Louis.

The full list of seminar participants is here; full schedule and registration information, here.

Arms Trade Treaty reaches 4/5 mark

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Following a raft of ratifications this week, the Arms Trade Treaty is 4/5 of the way toward entry into force.

Paying-the-priceDepositing their instruments of ratification on Tuesday were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Jamaica, Luxembourg, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Samoa. They join 30 other countries that’ve become full members of the treaty since its adoption by the U.N. General Assembly on April 2, 2013. Ten more joinders are needed for the treaty to take effect.

In its 28 articles, the Arms Trade Treaty provides for states parties’ regulation of traffic in a range of arms, from battle tanks to light weapons. (Prior posts available here.) As indicated by the Control Arms poster above, regulating the latter is a principal aim of treaty proponents. (image credit)

Among the 5 permanent members of the U.N. Security Council (among them major arms-exporting states), Britain and France have ratified. The United States signed last September, but the treaty has not been presented to the Senate for consideration. China has not signed; Deutsche Welle reported this week:

‘China has indicated that it would consider signing if the US ratified, which is unlikely to happen.’

And in late May, the Voice of Russia reported that the Russian Federation would not sign, for the following reasons:

‘Russia considers this document to be not completely thought through. It also discriminates against the Russian military-industrial complex.’

State Department confirms US support for Security Council referral of Syria to ICC

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page-06-image-UNHCR_v5.1_MapWith a hat tip to Colum Lynch of Foreign Policy, here’s the transcribed passage from today’s press briefing colloquy at which the U.S. Department of State confirmed that the United States now supports a referral of the situation in Syria to the U.N. Security Council:

QUESTION: Are you considering supporting a – UN Security Council authorizing a investigation by the ICC into war crimes in Syria?

MS. PSAKI: Ali, for you, let me check and see with her office if there’s more to convey on that. I do have something for you, Elise. One moment.

We do – the United States supports the referral to the ICC set forth in the draft resolution under discussion. We’ve long said that those responsible for atrocities in Syria must be held accountable, and we’ve been working with our Security Council colleagues on a draft resolution toward this end. We will also continue to support efforts to gather evidence to hold accountable those responsible for atrocities in Syria.

Go ahead.

QUESTION: Can you —

QUESTION: What changed your mind? I mean, originally, you had some concerns about whether this was the right venue to pursue accountability for Syrians.

MS. PSAKI: Well, obviously, we’ve remained concerned, continue to be concerned about the atrocities that we’ve been seeing on the ground. I don’t have any specific incident to point you to, just the ongoing gathering of what we’re seeing on the ground.

Reports are that the draft referral resolution – a draft that cannot take effect unless Russia and China decide to withhold vetoes – contains the same caveats that have drawn criticism with respect to Darfur and Libya. See, e.g., critiques in my articles (page 9 here, page 40 here, and pages 4, 8 here ; see too my posts here and here), as well as posts that NYU Law Professor Ryan Goodman published today, here and here. Spurring the latter was Lynch’s Wednesday scoop.

(credit for U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees October 2013 map of child refugees from Syria conflict)

Trial of accused Rwandan génocidaire Pascal Simbikangwa begins in Paris

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courThe 1994 genocide of nearly a million persons in Rwanda will be the subject of a trial beginning today before 6 jurors and 3 judges in the Paris Cour d’assises, or criminal court.

Charged with taking part in killings as part of an escadron de la mort, or death squad, is Pascal Simbikangwa, a 54-year-old man said to have been head of central intelligence and part of the inner circle of Juvénal Habyarimana, the Rwandan President whose April 6, 1994, death in a plane crash precipitated the genocide. The trial will involve testimony by historians, among other witnesses, and is set to be filmed in its entirety.

Le Monde‘s Stéphanie Maupas reported yesterday that this marks the 1st such trial in France, a country whose own behavior in Rwanda has been questioned. (And see here.) French authorities arrested Simbikangwa for trafficking in false papers in 2008 and subsequently refused the Rwandan government’s extradition request. A similar trial in Canada of another defendant ended last year in an acquittal; meanwhile, Belgium has convicted several such defendants in a series of trials.

Maupas’ report (available here and here) ended on a reflective note:

Le verdict devrait tomber mi-mars, juste avant les 20 ans du génocide. Vingt années durant lesquelles la France a été accusée d’offrir un exil confortable aux acteurs du génocide. Au-delà de l’histoire d’un homme, passible de la perpétuité, ce procès sera aussi le miroir des relations franco-rwandaises.

that is,

The verdict could come in mid-March, just before the twentieth anniversary of the genocide. Twenty years during which France has been accused of offering comfortable exile to génocidaires. In addition to the story of one man on trial for his life, this trial will also serve as a mirror of French-Rwandan relations.

What elevenses @ Security Council could mean for International Criminal Court

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unscMy colleague Beth Van Schaack, newly returned to academia after a stint as Deputy at the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice, has posted at Just Security on what the presence of 11 International Criminal Court states parties on the U.N. Security Council could mean for ICC-Security Council relations.

In the past, states parties like Guatemala have used their seat to sponsor ICC discussions at the Council, she writes, and notes that the newest member will hold the Council presidency next month. That would be Jordan, whose Permanent Representative, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein, has worked for years on ICC issues and has served as President of the ICC Assembly of States Parties. (credit for 2009 photo of Council in session)

One nagging problem for the Court has been state noncompliance with ICC orders – in particular, of arrest warrants for fugitives like Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir – and to date the Council has done little to command compliance by U.N. member states. Another, Van Schaack writes, is the Council’s withholding of sanctions against persons accused by the ICC. Yet another  is the resolution boilerplate by which the Council:

► 1st, declined to contribute funds to aid the investigation and prosecution of the Libya and Darfur situations that it referred to the Court; and

► 2d, immunized any national of a ICC nonparty states (read the United States) from ICC investigation, even if the national were suspected of committing ICC crimes in the referred situation.

(And see here.) In theory, the large presence of states parties could change these dynamics. Or not: Van Schaack writes of criticism that states “‘forget’ that they are ICC members when they are elected to the Council.”

And there is also the matter of the Council’s 4 members who are not ICC states parties, China, Rwanda, Russia, and the United States. Their attitudes toward the ICC range from ambivalent to downright hostile, and 3 of them are permanent members able to veto Council resolutions. Van Schaack indicates that this may have contributed to a “zeitgeist,” an opening for the proposal that the Council ought not veto measures aimed at stopping atrocities. As I detailed in An old new idea to break P-5 impasse, the idea’s been around for more than a decade, but gained new steam when France, a  Council permanent member, embraced it this autumn. The other P-5 ICC state party, Britain, has yet to weigh in.

Despite US caution, another ratification for ICC crime-of-aggression amendments

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Animated-Flag-BelgiumThe global push to make the aggressive use of armed force a crime punishable by the International Criminal Court picked up another supporter this week.

Belgium deposited its ratification of the Kampala amendments to the ICC Statute on Tuesday, thus becoming the 12th ICC state party to support the amendments, which, as previously posted here, here, and here, define the crime and set out the paths by which persons suspected of responsibility for aggression may be called to account before the ICC.

Pursuant to the compromise reached at the 2010 ICC Review Conference in Kampala, Uganda, the amendments may not take effect before 2017, and then only after a further vote and the ratification by at least 30 states. Belgium’s joinder this week means the ratifications halfway point is near. Indeed, a tally of pledges made by other states both before and during this month’s annual meeting of the ICC Assembly of States Parties reveals that it is quite likely that the 30-ratification threshold will be reached well before 2017. (See my October post and the recent statements in the Crime of Aggression Twitter feed.)

usflagBut that was not the only crime-of-aggression news this month. Also at the Assembly meeting, just five days before Belgium deposited its joinder, the most vocal of ICC nonparty states weighed in: the United States’ top international criminal justice diplomat urged states not to make the crime of aggression punishable. That diplomat – Ambassador Stephen J. Rapp, head of the State Department’s Office of Global Criminal Justice – concluded his November 21 address to the Assembly by stating:

‘Another challenge with which the international community needs to grapple involves the crime of aggression.’

He made clear that U.S. statements against the amendments, made just after the end of the Kampala conference, still held:

‘The United States continues to have many concerns about the amendments adopted in Kampala, including the risk of these amendments working at cross-purposes with efforts to prevent or punish genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes—which provide the very raison d’être for the Court.’

And he urged a rethinking of the endeavor:

‘The States Parties were wise to create breathing space by subjecting the Court’s jurisdiction to a decision to be taken after January 1, 2017. The international community should use that breathing space to ensure that efforts to ensure accountability for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes can be consolidated and that measures regarding the amendments requiring attention can be properly considered; …’

With that, Rapp concluded:

‘… and it is our view that States should not move forward with ratifications pending the resolution of such issues.’

His exhortation appears not to have moved some states, including some of the United States’ NATO partners – among them, Belgium, Estonia, Germany, Luxembourg, and Slovenia, which already have ratified, as well as Croatia, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Spain, which reportedly are working toward ratification.

Rather quiet in this debate are 2 states parties that belong to NATO and also hold permanent seats at the U.N. Security Council. How Britain and France proceed remains to be seen.

French retain humor though shocked, shocked by extent of NSA espionage

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Le Monde online debuts a novel feature today: articles en anglais. Prompting the presence of some English-language items is the Paris daily’s exposé of the degree to which the United States’ National Security Agency has been monitoring, well, everybody – including citizens of France.

“patateNSA: un système géant d’espionnage mondial,” declares the banner headline. Beneath it are several sidebar articles, including, in a welcome mat from readers across the Channel and across the Pond, many with English titles and text. Examples: “Inside the NSA’s web of surveillance” and “France in the crosshair: Wanadoo and Alcatel targeted.”

There is much anger reported at these revelations. A leader of the National Assembly admitted that the fact that the NSA is surveilling France is not surprising. But he continued (my translation):

‘[T]he real discovery in this affair is the extent and the systematic nature of these wiretaps. These practices … damage considerably the image of this great democratic nation and question its conception of the world and of fundamental liberties.’

Despite that dark apparent reference to the United States’ global stature, a few cartoonists have approached the news with humor, telling the story “en patates.” The video published by Le Monde recounts the experiences of the “Lafrite” family  – the mother who works for Alcatel, the son who uses social media to keep in touch with a buddy in Turkey, and the father who stays clear of electronics (except to watch webcasts of “Game of Thrones”) – not to mention the sunglass-sporting NSA agent (above) who watches them. The video ends with President-Hollande-as-potato, peering at his own presumably compromised computer.

“Comment la NSA vous surveille (expliqué en patates)” is here; Francophones, enjoy.

An old new idea to break P-5 impasse

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p5Rather muted in the U.S. press is France’s recent call for “self-restraint” on its part and that of its veto-friendly partners in the P-5.

The P-5, of course, are the 5 countries with permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council. By U.N. Charter mandate, each of the 5 enjoys the right to veto a resolution authorizing intervention – even if the rest of the 15-member Council finds harm to international peace and security. As has been evident in the 2-plus years of Syria’s civil war, by exercising its veto a P-5 member can leave a matter run its course without international intervention no matter what the casualty count.

France has suggested a way out of this predicament. As stated in an op-ed that Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius published October 4 in Le Monde, in French, and in the International Herald-Tribune, in English, here’s the idea:

‘[T]he five permanent members of the Security Council – China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States – themselves could voluntarily regulate their right to exercise their veto. The Charter would not be amended and the change would be implemented through a mutual commitment from the permanent members. In concrete terms, if the Security Council were required to make a decision with regard to a mass crime, the permanent members would agree to suspend their right to veto.’

How to determine when the commitment is in play? It’s “simple,” Fabius wrote:

‘[A]t the request of at least 50 member states, the United Nations secretary general would be called upon to determine the nature of the crime. Once he had delivered his opinion, the code of conduct would immediately apply.’

Fabius recognized “that objections of all kinds can be made,” and sought to deflect some of them with this caveat:

‘[T]his code would exclude cases where the vital national interests of a permanent member of the Council were at stake.’

It is not a new idea. As pointed out in an October 3 lecture at Georgia Law by Lee A. Feinstein, the former U.S. Ambassador to Poland who’s teaching here this semester, a similar idea appeared as Principle 3(D) of The Responsibility to Protect, the 2001 Report of the Independent Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which launched the responsibility to protect concept.

What is new is that the show of support comes from a P-5 state itself. Yet it must be mentioned that France has vetoed far fewer times than most of its peers on the P-5. And those peers likely will be far less enamored of France’s idea, as Mark Goldberg posted at UN Dispatch.

What could draw those peers toward France’s idea? Perhaps an understanding that a P-5 member’s “vital national interests” are “at stake” whenever a resolution implicates the member’s client state. But then adoption would be hollow, for such a proviso would sap the proposal of its strength.

(credit for September 2013 U.N. photo by Mark Garten of, from left, British Foreign Secretary William Hague, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi)

Disparition: Jacques Vergès (1925?-2013)

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?????????????????????????????A lightning-rod figure in international criminal law has left the bar: Jacques Vergès died in Paris Thursday. He’d been born in what was then Siam 88 years earlier – “theoretically,” according to Le Monde. The obituary hedges because Vergès’ birth, to a Vietnamese mother and a father who was the head of the French consulate, may in fact have occurred many months before the date that his parents married and proclaimed his arrival. Vergès made that personal history part of his public identity, even titling a 1997 memoir Le salaud lumineux (The Shining Bastard).

As an attorney, he took part in the defense of persons charged with heinous international offenses, such as genocide and crimes against humanity. These included Klaus Barbie, the German Nazi officer charged and eventually convicted in French national courts of World War II-era crimes (prior posts); Slobodan Milošević, the former President of Serbia who died in custody midway through his trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (prior posts); Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan, still on trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (prior posts available here) (credit for 2008 photo of Vergès at the ECCC); and Laurent Gbagbo, the former President of Côte d’Ivoire who awaits trial before the International Criminal Court.

Vergès’ signature technique was the défense de rupture, a turning of the tables that put not the accused, but rather the judicial institution and the instant prosecution, on trial. Such challenges compelled close examination of the courts and the proceedings. Put succinctly, Vergès’ techniques gave concrete reality to the notion of adversary proceedings. French legal experts remembered him as “courageous,” “provocative,” “intelligent.” And infuriating: his opponent in Barbie, attorney/author Serge Klarsfeld, told Le Monde (my translation):

‘Having conveyed my hostility to Jacques Vergès sufficiently while he was alive, I will refrain from speaking at this moment of his death.’

China’s stance on Syria, informed by use of responsibility to protect doctrine in Libya

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Did regime-change overreach in Libya seal the awful fate that civilians have endured these last years in Syria? A new article in a Beijing-based law journal, China Legal Science, strongly argues “Yes.”

liAmong the 5 permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are 3 from the West – Britain, France, and the United States – plus China and Russia. The latter 2 countries have incurred much criticism for blocking Council action on Syria. ‘Way back in October 2011, for example, the United States’ Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Susan E. Rice, “storm[ed] out” after the latter 2 P-5 countries refused to join what she called “a watered-down resolution” against Syria. Criticism has tended to center around Russia’s commercial and geopolitical relationships with Syria. But the new article, “Responsibility to Protect: A Challenge to Chinese Traditional Diplomacy” (no. 1-2013, pp. 97-120), indicates that other concerns also have been at play. Asserts Dr. Zhu Wenqi, Professor of International Law at Renmin University (formerly a diplomat in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and an attorney in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and holder of a doctorate from the University of Paris II):

‘The Council’s failure to take action in the Syrian case is because of reflections by China and Russia upon what happened after the resolutions adopted by the Security Council in the case of Libya.’

Zhu cites Resolution 1970 (Feb. 26, 2011), which imposed certain sanctions against Libya and referred the situation to the International Criminal Court, and Resolution 1973 (Mar. 17, 2011), which authorized member states “to take all necessary measures … to protect civilians.” China voted in favor of 1970 and abstained from voting on 1973. In positing “the Libyan authorities’ responsibility to protect” its people, each resolution invoked the responsibility to protect doctrine. With admirable clarity and conciseness, Zhu recounts the 15-year history of that doctrine, by which:

► 1st, each state has a duty to protect its own population; and

► 2d, should a state fail in its duty, the international community has the responsibility to step in and protect the threatened population.

What happened right after adoption of Resolution 1973? NATO mounted a many-month military operation, which ended only after Libya’s longtime ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, was deposed, put on the run, and ultimately killed. The Security Council had not made regime change an explicit aim in either Resolution 1970 or Resolution 1973; a month into the intervention, however, an op-ed by the leaders of the Western P-5 members insisted that Gaddafi “must go, and go for good.” Zhu writes that this ouster effort led China to criticize the resolutions as “pretextual” and as costly in the numbers of civilians harmed.

The Libya lesson has prompted China to resist calls for intervention in Syria, Zhu states. (credit for AP photo above, captioned “Chinese Ambassador to the UN Li Baodong sitting with his hands down as Security Council members vote on resolution to back an Arab League call for Syria’s Assad to step down, Feb. 4, 2012”) What’s more, it has led China to revert to skepticism toward the doctrine of responsibility to protect. In an account that echoes writings of Judge Xue Hanqin on which I recently posted, Zhu sets out not only the value that China places on the sovereignty guarantees in Article 2(4), (7) of the U.N. Charter, but also the relation of that value to the desire to maintain independence from “‘the remnants of imperialist and colonialist oppression'” (quoting the late Wang Tieya). Quoting from this article, Zhu writes that China’s opposition to regime change in Syria is seen as reinforcing the Charter:

‘In the eyes of many Chinese evaluators, China’s attitude toward the Syrian issue actually demonstrated that China “is assuming more responsibilities and obligations” in international affairs.’

Amid this week’s reports that the United States may be backing off from demands for the resignation of Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, the article is timely – and its explication of the Chinese legal perspective on global security has value any time.