International Law Archive

AT THE UNITED NATIONS, NEW YORK — The fanfare that opens the U.N. General Assembly’s annual session is played on the sirens of New York police cars trying to clear a path through Manhattan traffic for the motorcades of visiting world leaders. New Yorkers are resigned to this autumnal ritual that causes midtown streets to be closed and fills the city’s hotels to capacity — at prices inflated for the occasion. The Waldorf Astoria Hotel, where President Bush overnighted Monday while in town to deliver the inaugural address the following morning became a fortress, surrounded by hundreds of New York’s […]

CAMBODIA CHARGES SENIOR KHMER ROUGE OFFICIAL — Cambodian authorities have arrested the Khmer Rouge’s ideological chief, Nuon Chea, to answer charges at a United Nations-backed tribunal that he planned and helped execute the murders of up to 1.7 million people. Chea, the most senior surviving member of Pol Pot’s murderous regime, was arrested Sept. 19 and charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The move comes less than two months after the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) issued formal charges on July 31 against Kaing Guek Eav (better known by his alias, Duch) who ran S-21, […]

MEMORIES AND MEMOIRS — At a farewell dinner for departing British ambassador Sir David Manning in Washington Friday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warmly recalled how she and Manning had worked together during the Iraq war: Rice as national security adviser to President Bush, and the ambassador as her counterpart at 10 Downing Street. But this harmonious picture doesn’t quite match the one Manning painted in the New Statesman magazine, claiming that the Bush administration sometimes failed to inform Prime Minister Tony Blair of key decisions on Iraq, or failed to take into account British objections. For example, Manning insists […]

Editor’s Note: Rights & Wrongs is a weekly column covering the world’s major human rights-related happenings. It is written by regular WPR contributor Juliette Terzieff. DETAINED IRANIAN-AMERICAN LOOKS TO HEAD HOME — A spokesman for Iran’s judiciary confirmed detained Iranian-American consultant Kian Tajbakhsh likely will soon be free to return home after months in Iran’s Evin prison. The statement from Ali Reza Jamshidi came during a state-organized visit for journalists to view conditions at the much-maligned facility, where brief interaction with a reportedly well-looking Tajbakhsh was allowed. Authorities have not filed official charges against Tajbakhsh, an urban planning consultant for […]

WASHINGTON — The hybrid war crimes tribunal set up by the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations achieved what international observers described as a major milestone in July when it delivered sentences of 45 and 50 years to three men convicted of committing war crimes during Sierra Leone’s late-1990s civil war. The ruling at the Special Court for Sierra Leone marked the first-ever conviction of an African warlord for using child soldiers, and it came just a few weeks before a second round of convictions, on Aug. 2, in which two other former militia leaders were found guilty […]

Editor’s Note: Rights & Wrongs is a weekly column covering the world’s major human rights-related happenings. It is written by regular WPR contributor Juliette Terzieff. AFGHAN FAMILY BREAKS RAPE SILENCE — One Afghan family in Ghazni province has chosen to break the wall of silence surrounding crimes of rape in the hopes of finding justice for a 7-year-old family member who was repeatedly raped by two brothers from a neighboring family. The youngster, according to reports, was lured into the house by the brothers’ sister and viciously assaulted. While police initially detained the two, they were quickly released. Death threats […]