Legal Responses to Genocide and Other Massive Violations of Human Rights

The international community could halt the proliferation of genocides by arresting them before, or at least while they are happening, by any means necessary. Instead, the focus is on actions after the fact

Institutions and Practices for Restoring and Maintaining Public Order

In the wake of the atrocities committed in Cambodia, southern Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Haiti, many in the international community have called for the creation of ad hoc or standing international criminal courts to deal with some types of international delicts. Courts are indispensable institutions in many domestic criminal and civil systems, and any polity, no matter how structured, must have arrangements, of varying degrees of institutionalization, to apply the law to concrete cases. But lest we fall victim to a judicial romanticism in which we imagine that merely by creating entities we call courts we have solved major problems, we should review the fundamental goals that institutions designed to protect public order seek to fulfill. Goal clarification is especially important when our passions are engaged, as indeed they should be, upon encountering atrocities such as those of Rwanda. Indignation can be a powerful and productive source of political energy, but only if we tap it to stimulate the design of institutions that protect, restore, and improve public order

Redesigning the United Nations

This article examines the case for United Nations reform, assessed from the perspectives of what the author terms design principles : instruments used to appraise organizational performance and to contemplate alternatives. Applied to the constitutional climate of the United Nations today, the article examines, inter alia, the contemporary issues surrounding the expansion of permanent membership in the Security Council and the assessment of the General Assembly\u27s continuing vitality

Sovereignty and Human Rights in Contemporary International Law

Since Aristotle, the term sovereignty has had a long and varied history during which it has been given different meanings, hues and tones, depending on the context and the objectives of those using the word. Bodin and Hobbes shaped the term to serve their perception of an urgent need for internal order. Their conception influenced several centuries of international politics and law and also became a convenient supplementary secular slogan for the various absolute monarchies of the time. Sovereignty often came to be an attribute of a powerful individual, whose legitimacy over territory (which was often described as his domain and even identified with him) rested on a purportedly direct or delegated divine or historic authority but certainly not, Hobbes\u27s covenant of the multitude notwithstanding, on the consent of the people

An International Farce: The Sad Case of the PLO Mission

At the end of one of his great farces, Shakespeare\u27s King of France assures us that [a]ll is well ended, if this suit be won. But lawyers know that the ways in which outcomes are achieved may themselves have precedential effects on future procedures. Even a tolerable outcome in a particular case may yield long-term consequences that bedevil efforts at public order. This possibility is the detritus of the PLO Mission affair. All may have ended well. Before we congratulate ourselves on the operation of justice, however, we should reflect on all the lamentable behavior that precipitated the crisis and on all the ill-considered actions that helped to resolve it

When Are Economic Sanctions Effective? Selected Theorems And Corollaries

Economic sanctions may take many forms and may be applied unilaterally or multilaterally, but like all uses of the economic instrument, they involve the purposive threat or actual granting or withholding of economic indulgences, opportunities, and benefits by one actor or group of actors in order to induce another actor or group of actors to change or adjust an internal or external policy

The Vision and Mission of The Yale Journal of International Law

The twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of The Yale Journal of International Law is an occasion to reflect on the origins of this remarkable journal, the sense of mission that animated its founders, and the context in which it was forged. It is also an occasion to look forward, for this journal, more than any other international law journal, saw itself engaged consciously and explicitly in an essentially futuristic enterprise. Unlike its contemporary counterparts, which were essentially retrospective, concerned with the codification and assembly of decisions from the past into a neat mosaic, then presented as the law, the new Yale journal\u27s avowed mission from the start was to contribute to the formation and appraisal of international policy. So let me begin with a brief informal history of The Yale Journal ofInternational Law

Reporting the Facts As They Are Not Known: Media Responsibility in Concealed Human Rights Violations

When formal institutions prove unable to discharge indispensable social tasks, functional equivalents develop. Consider the institutional fact-gathering procedures of the international legal system. Because they are underdeveloped or ineffective, authoritative decision makers must depend, to an astonishing degree, on the private media for the images that lead to provisional characterizations of norm violation and the initiation of international action. Even where the intelligence and invocation functions of decision are institutionally developed and effective in high degree, independent and vigorous media are not redundant. Their presence and activity supplement and police official fact-gathering procedures. In the United States, media frequently initiate decision by provisionally characterizing certain behavior as improper. This latent role of private national media is even more urgent internationally

Harnessing International Law to Restrain and Recapture Indigenous Spoliations

The ritual of condemnation of foreign corporations\u27 spoliations of the resources of developing countries and their elevation to the level of international concern have obscured the problem of spoliations by national officials of the wealth of the states of which they are temporary custodians. The pathology is not restricted to developing countries. Quite the contrary. Gibbon called it the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty. But the consequences for developing countries are often catastrophic, for the issue is not garden-variety corruption. The amounts involved can be stunning, at times reportedly equaling the national debt.\u27 In some cases, absconding officials have left the economies of their countries ransacked and destroyed