The Irresolution of Rome

Wedgwood argues that it would be a pity to allow international misjudgment of the long-term security environment to generate a disregard for the constructive tasks of American military power, and fatally hobble shared support for an effective criminal tribunal. American Senators and military leaders--and the American public--will want to see how the International Criminal Court works in practice before considering the possibility of full ratification and formal membership. If this look-over period is not safe, the advocates seeking a war on the court may win the day

The Evolution of United Nations Peacekeeping

Does multilateralism deserve moral suspicion? It is a well-put question, worth facing prior to our inquiry into peacekeeping. Some of the classical conditions of peacekeeping will be newly explicable; the classical limits to peacekeeping fit these moral concerns. Traditionally, multilateralism has been challenged as a road to lassitude, inaction and self-defeat. The suggestion here is different. Professor Fernando Tesón has argued that multilateralism may fall prey to the moral short-sightedness of a purely self-regarding decision. Indeed, in international law circles, an enthusiasm for multilateralism sometimes brings a suspension of judgment. Even international lawyers who admit the deep interweaving of law and morality, drift towards a multilateral positivism —the presumption that if a decision is reached multilaterally, it can\u27t be wrong. The Security Council, in this view, becomes a lawmaking institution; its actions create new norms eo ipso. The Security Council is its own law and sets its own principles. The ordinary inquiry appropriate to the intervention of one country into another country\u27s affairs, a skepticism or burden of persuasion for unilateral intervention, turns to credulity if the action is multilateral

The United States and the International Criminal Court: Achieving a Wider Consensus Through the “Ithaca Package”

The debate over the International Criminal Court (ICC) has reached a crucial juncture. The ICC has been a long-standing project, actively underway since the 1980s. Originally, the ICC was designed to meet the concerns of Caribbean countries about extraterritorial national criminal jurisdiction. The war in the former Yugoslavia and the massacres in Rwanda made it plain that additional forms of deterrence were necessary to address genocide, systematic war crimes, and crimes against humanity. In 1994, the International Law Commission proposed a draft statute for a permanent international criminal court worked over and debated during three additional years of preparatory work, and then brought forward in July 1998 by the Rome Conference, after five weeks of intense negotiations, in a proposed treaty package to establish the ICC. The Rome Conference achieved several important goals. The Rome Treaty established that the Court\u27s jurisdiction should extend to internal as well as international conflicts. Although the Geneva Conventions of 1949 restrict their jurisdiction to interstate war and many States remain equivocal about international intervention, the Bosnian and Rwandan examples are too shocking, and the development of international human rights law too far along, to permit the claim that abuse of a national population is of no concern to other international actors. The Rome Treaty also applied the modern definition of crimes against humanity, recognizing that constraints on gross abuse of a population should not be limited to events in a state of war. Rather, systematic and extreme mistreatment of a local population, through torture, disappearances, and extrajudicial executions, can be charged as a crime against humanity even if war has not been declared. A broad definition of crimes against humanity warns all governments of the possible consequences of violence directed towards their own people

United Nations Peacekeeping Operations and the Use of Fforce

When one views the UN up close, in the field and in New York, much of the unsteadiness in discharging its missions stems from the organization’s deep ambivalence about the proper use of force in international conflict resolution and its hobbled ability to muster efficacious force

The Revolutionary Martyrdom of Jonathan Robbins

The last scene is the hardest to write, in drama and in revolution. Once political actors spurn existing allegiances, anxiety must attend. How is the revolution to close, consolidate itself and begin the normal tasks of governance? What regime of law can succeed pure politics? One way to examine these problems is in our own past, in the attitudes of our founding revolutionaries toward continuing insurgency. When the American War for Independence was completed and peace restored, did we see ourselves still as a revolutionary people, favoring structures of governance that would amplify popular voice and sustain resistance against authority, championing rebellion abroad and at home against any undemocratic form? Or did we regard ourselves in a more conservative mien, aloof from continuing challenge, seeing the revolution as one round only and returning to a classical ideal of government in which balance should quell upheaval, seeking our place in a settled family of nations and favoring forms of domestic governance that would enforce our commercial and public obligations under the law of nations? This Article proposes to examine our early self-conception, as revolutionary beacon or conservative actor, through the lens of the law concerning political extradition, in particular, the case of Jonathan Robbins in 1799 and 1800, leader of a rebellion on an English ship in the midst of the Napoleonic wars. Hung in chains for his part in the shipboard mutiny, surrendered to British military justice despite his last moment claim that he was an American impressed into the British navy, Jonathan Robbins provoked a pitched battle among Americans. Attitudes toward revolution and resistance may be set by varying judgment whether rebellion\u27s violence and disorder can be controlled and contained. By that measure, Robbins gave stridor and alarm. He was the American regaining his freedom by force used in self-defense. He was also the seaborne Jacobin, claiming liberty as excuse for the pointless slaughter of a wardroom of ship\u27s officers