Rushworth M. Kidder (1944-2012)

Rushworth M. Kidder, long-time reporter and columnist for the Christian Science Monitor and founder of the Institute for Global Ethics (IGE), died on Monday.  He devoted much of his life to ethics education.

My primary connection to his work came through a slender volume he published in 1995 called How Good People Make Tough Choices.  Even though it was not geared toward foreign policy debates, its simple framework for working through ethical dilemmas provided a solid introduction to ethical decisionmaking for my Ethics and International Politics course.  Kidder argued that an ethical dilemma involves a "right vs. right" choice, in contrast to what he called moral temptations that involve choices between right and wrong.  Ethical dilemmas, he believed, tend to fit one of four paradigms:  truth vs. loyalty, individual vs. community, short-term vs. long-term, or justice vs. mercy.  He classified the options for resolving ethical dilemmas using three categories:  rules-based ethics, ends-based ethics, and care-based ethics.  Simple, certainly, but helpful for that very reason.

For a more complete obituary, see the Bangor Daily News article here.

Meeting the MDGs

During the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000, world leaders agreed to a set of objectives to be met by 2015.  These Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were designed to address seemingly intractable development and human security issues.  In spite of the global economic recession that began in 2008, the goal of cutting in half the number of people living in extreme poverty has been met ahead of schedule,according to new data from the World Bank.

The New York Times reports:

For the first time since the World Bank started keeping statistics in 1981, poverty fell in every region of the world on a three-year timeframe. In sub-Saharan Africa, the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty fell below 50 percent for the first time. And between 1981 and 2008, poverty fell to just less than a quarter of the developing world’s population from more than half.

Another of the MDGs--cutting in half the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015--has also been met according to data jointly reported by UNICEF and the World Health Organization.

Getting the State Right

In his 1940 essay "Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist," Reinhold Niebuhr argued that one of the problems with pacifism is that by avoiding the anarchy of war it gives those, like Hitler, who would impose tyranny through war (or the threat of war) a free pass.  Those concerned with justice, Niebuhr suggested, must oppose both anarchy and tyranny.  "The political life of man," he wrote, "must constantly steer between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of tyranny."

Niebuhr's essay appeared as Nazi Germany was extending Hitler's tyranny over vast stretches of Europe.  Britain was enduring an aerial assault and the United States was, as yet, committed only to the sale of weapons to anti-Nazi forces.  Niebuhr's concern, at least in this essay, was for international anarchy--war--and international tyranny--conquest--rather than for internal manifestations of anarchy and tyranny.  But his observation about steering between the two extremes seems especially relevant, in a world moving beyond war, to the problems that remain within states.

The state, it seems, is a difficult thing to get right.  It must ensure order, on the one hand, while protecting freedom, on the other.  Put differently, it must apply sufficient constraints--that is, it must be strong enough--to eliminate anarchy without going so far as to impose tyranny.  In our time, Somalia has been the prime example of a state incapable of governing its own territory effectively so as to eliminate anarchy.  But it is not the only one.  Following soon after the end of the Cold War, the phenomenon of state failure appeared so widespread that some began to separate the cases into the categories of weak states, failed states, and collapsed states.

At the other end of the spectrum lies North Korea, which is likely not only the most secretive but the most repressive contemporary state.  Anarchy is hardly the problem in North Korea, but life is no better there--and perhaps much worse for many people--than it would be in a collapsed state.

Human rights are possible only in the passage between "the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of tyranny."  Democracy, in fact, appears in the middle, although not at a single, fixed point between anarchy and tyranny.  States that allow for a full range of human rights appear at various points along the spectrum of state authority, but are never too far from the center.

Perhaps we can call this "the Goldilocks problem" in international politics.  Some states are too hard, some are too soft, but others are just right.  Or at least close enough to "just right" for human rights to flourish.

"What's Wrong with Bomb First and Think Later?"

From Maureen Dowd's column in the New York Times today:

Oh, Barack.

You want to analyze the cost and consequences of war before you go to war?

Such a snob. Such a green eyeshade rejection of the red-hot Bush doctrine.

What’s wrong with bomb first and think later? That worked fine in Iraq. Or not.

Meet the Band

After last night's nightmare involving metal scraping against bones--yes, I got my teeth cleaned yesterday--I probably didn't need to start the day with a video of small drones teaming up to play the James Bond theme.  (It's the third video embedded in the article--the one labeled "Vijay Kumar:  Robots that fly . . . and cooperate.")

This--the use of autonomous drone swarms--is one of the more important new developments in military robotics.  And by that I don't mean we'll soon see military bands replaced by quadrotors playing specially modified musical instruments at inaugural balls.  Instead, consider the current challenge posed for the International Aerial Robotics Competition:  Teams must design a flying robot capable of silently entering a building through a window, finding a designated office inside, locating and taking a USB flash drive from a desk, and replacing the flash drive with another that looks like it.

That's what I'd call a practical application.

SCOTUS and the ATS

Yesterday the U.S. Supreme Court issued a new order in the case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, which was heard last Tuesday.  The order requires that new briefs be filed by both sides on this issue:  "Whether and under what circumstances the Alien Tort Statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1350, allows courts to recognize a cause of action for violations of the law of nations occurring within the territory of a sovereign other than the United States."  The case will be reargued in the 2012-2013 term.

This unusual step by the Court raises the possibility that cases arising under the ATS could be limited to those occurring on the territory of the United States or in nonsovereign spaces (res communis), such as the high seas.  This, in turn, would essentially mean the end of international human rights litigation in U.S. federal courts.

For more on this, see Lyle Deniston's commentary on SCOTUSblog and John Bellinger's take over at Lawfare.

"Too Much Loose Talk of War"

Amid increasing pressure to draw "red lines" that would trigger an American military response to Iran's nuclear program, President Obama yesterday addressed AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee).  While affirming the strength of U.S.-Israeli ties and his commitment to preventing Iran from building nuclear weapons, the president pushed back against Republican presidential candidates who have argued for a more aggressive policy toward Iran and against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's efforts to get the United States to promise military action if the Iranians fail to meet certain preconditions.

Here are the key paragraphs from the speech:

Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.  And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.

Moving forward, I would ask that we all remember the weightiness of these issues; the stakes involved for Israel, for America, and for the world.  Already, there is too much loose talk of war.  Over the last few weeks, such talk has only benefited the Iranian government, by driving up the price of oil, which they depend on to fund their nuclear program.  For the sake of Israel’s security, America’s security, and the peace and security of the world, now is not the time for bluster.  Now is the time to let our increased pressure sink in, and to sustain the broad international coalition we have built.  Now is the time to heed the timeless advice from Teddy Roosevelt:  Speak softly; carry a big stick.  And as we do, rest assured that the Iranian government will know our resolve, and that our coordination with Israel will continue.

Amir Oren, writing in Haaretz, said this of President Obama:  "No one who knows Washington and its ways could mistake the subtext of his words. A strong commitment to Israel? Assuredly. Capitulation to the dictates of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?  Not a chance."  For his part, Prime Minister Netanyahu, in Canada to meet with Prime Minister Stephen Harper before continuing to Washington for today's meeting with President Obama, praised the president's statements asserting support for Israel's right to defend itself and opposition to Iran's efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Tom McCarthy of The Guardian describes how American electoral politics complicates the tense relationship between Obama and Netanyahu:

If Netanyahu decides he doesn't need Obama to hit Iran--or that the threat to Israel is too great to wait--then all bets suddenly are off.  What if instead of Mitt Romney the president suddenly faces a reelection fight involving a new war in the Middle East, expensive gas, U.S. casualties and a new economic dive--plus Mitt Romney (or Rick Santorum)?  Netanyahu knows that Obama knows that Netanyahu knows this.

Unnecessary Evils

I don't remember exactly when I first read the late John H. Yoder's Nevertheless:  The Varieties and Shortcomings of Religious Pacifism, but it was either sometime in the early 1980s or maybe a little later in the decade when I first began teaching a course called Ethics and International Politics.  The book made an impression--so much so that a quarter of a century later I sought out a copy of the book, read a  few chapters, and decided to include it among the required texts for this semester's iteration of the Ethics course.  On Thursday we'll take up Nevertheless, along with Reinhold Niebuhr's 1940 essay, "Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist" and Michael Walzer's afterword to Just and Unjust Wars, in which he comments on the theory of nonviolence.  I approach this discussion with the hope that my students will appreciate not only the tremendous power of these three intellects but the gravity--and the extraordinary durability--of the debate in which they have engaged.  War, after all, seems to be a truly perennial problem, not to mention one of humanity's most terrible and unconquerable vices.

Or is it?  One of the reasons I found myself drawn to pick up Yoder's Nevertheless last fall was a sense that the world is catching up with the wisdom of those who, like Yoder, have long argued that violence offers no more, or better, guarantees for those concerned with justice than the nonviolent alternatives.  John Mueller's Retreat from Doomsday:  The Obsolescence of Major War, which appeared over twenty years ago, argued that war, like slavery and dueling, is an idea that people have come to regard as wrong because it is both immoral and dysfunctional.  The data show that interstate war is very much in decline, a point that Americans tend to miss thanks to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the quasi-war in Pakistan.  Charles Kupchan has recently attempted, in How Enemies Become Friends, to illustrate the ways that what may have appeared to be permanent enmities between states can be, and actually are, overcome.  Kathryn Sikkink, in The Justice Cascade, argues that prosecutions of serious human rights abuses are having a discernible deterrent effect.  Ruti Teitel's book Humanity's Law traces a transition in the international legal system away from the traditional emphasis on national security toward an emphasis on human security, a transition that moves us away from international politics as usual.  And Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature:  Why Violence Has Declined, asserts that violence at all levels of human interaction--from the interpersonal to the international--is at historically low levels.  War is neither as common as it once was, nor as acceptable.

The long span of history through which war has been a constant in many (but by no means all) societies makes it difficult to discern some important changes in humanity's attitude toward war.  One of the most important of these attitudinal changes took place as a consequence of what, before an even greater war occurred, was called the Great War.  Before World War I, war was commonly (although by no means universally) regarded as a rousing and ennobling experience.  Afterward, war was considered brutalizing, wanton, and even stupid.  (The change is exemplified by two  World War I poems:  "Pro Patria," by Owen Seaman, and "Dulce et Decorum Est," by Wilfred Owen.)  Even if it oversimplifies, one can argue that war, in the collective conscience of humankind, went from being a good thing to being a necessary evil.  It might be necessary for the British and French and others to fight the Germans again in 1939, but it would be a relative good (or a necessary evil) rather than an absolute good as some had regarded it in 1914.  Today, war is still defended as a necessary evil (rather than an absolute good), although even this justification is wearing thin.  What has sustained the idea that war is a necessary evil has been consequentialist reasoning that, in the end, has often been proved wrong.  The most obvious recent case is the Iraq War, justified by the Bush administration by reference to what might happen if Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, which he didn't have, were allowed to fall into the hands of Al-Qaeda (with which he had no real connection).

Yoder commented in Nevertheless on the fallacy of consequentialist justifications for war.  He did so using one of  the articles of faith in Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realist worldview for support.  Given Niebuhr's opposition, at least from World War II on, to almost every form of pacifism that Yoder defended, Yoder's ability to appeal to  one of Niebuhr's masterpieces, The Irony of American History, for support is especially noteworthy.  Yoder noted a problem with "prudential calculation," which is the summum bonum of the political realist and the central ethical responsibility of the just-war theorist:  "The good which is predicted does not come as a result of the war; evils which were not foreseen do actually arise."  Or, as Donald Rumsfeld put it when the U.S. invasion of Iraq proved not to be the cakewalk that had been predicted, "Stuff happens."

This is where Niebuhr's view of the irony of history comes in to bolster Yoder's argument.  Yoder, in fact, seemed to take a little dig at Niebuhr--at least if we pause to interpret the quotation marks deployed in the following passage:

Reinhold Niebuhr has described as "irony" this characteristic of the historical process which generally produces results different from those by which decisions were thought to have been justified.  That events should be impossible to predict with such certainty that moral choices can be made by reasoning back from the predicted outcomes, only stands to reason in a universe in which the centers of decision-making are multiple.  When the historical process is conceived as a model machine where one person pushes the buttons or even as a nation with a single capital, then to make decisions on the grounds of the simple choice between ultimate outcomes has a certain logic, even though already here it pretends to a utopian degree of omniscience.  But when multiple other decision-makers are trying to do the same thing, each with a different set of goals, a different set of assumptions about the rules of the whole game and a different set of expectations about how they expect the other partners of the game to play, it is a mathematical certainty that none of the options among which we claim to be choosing can come to pass.

 "Irony" indeed.  What is also ironic is this:  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have obscured the broad and unmistakable global trend away from war, have further undermined the primary remaining justification for war.  It is more difficult--but certainly not impossible--in light of the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts to sustain the belief that war may be a necessary evil.  In both cases, predictions about the good to be achieved and the evil that might result were seriously off the mark.  What Barbara Tuchman called "the march of folly" (defined as "the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests") will no doubt continue to produce wars, but with declining levels of credulity in response to claims that those wars are necessary evils.

Obiang Responds . . . Foolishly

According to a report by RFI, Teodoro Nguema Obiang, whose Paris residence was raided last month by French authorities as part of the biens mal acquis investigation, plans to sue Daniel Lebègue, president of the French branch of Transparency International.  TI in France and a second French NGO, Sherpa, played key roles in pursuading the government to undertake the biens mal acquis investigation that is targeting French assets of the ruling families of Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Cameroon.  Obiang alleges that Lebègue has libeled him by publicly accusing him of stealing money from the public treasury of Equatorial Guinea.

RFI reports that French police took 200 cubic meters worth of objets d'art from the Obiang estate on Avenue Foch.  Equatorial Guinea claims that the building was used for diplomatic purposes, making the French seizures a violation of diplomatic immunity, and that the lavish furnishings were appropriate expenditures given the diplomatic function.  French authorities counter that the estate contained a nightclub, a hair salon, and other rooms not normally found in diplomatic properties.

If the suit against Mr. Lebègue proceeds, Transparency International and other NGOs will no doubt relish the opportunity to prove in a court of law that the Obiang family is using Equatorial Guinea's petroleum income for private purposes.  This, in fact, is what they have fought to have happen since 2007.

More on Kiobel

This op-ed from last Sunday's Los Angeles Times speaks eloquently to the need for corporate liability in international human rights cases.  In it, Ka Hsaw Wa, the executive director of EarthRights International, describes the human rights abuses committed by Unocal and the Burmese military that prompted the Doe v. Unocal suit settled in 2005 following almost a decade of litigation.

Also, the LA Times editorial board gets it right in this editorial, which concludes, "As long as U.S. courts are open to  such [human rights] suits, there should be no distinction between individual and corporate defendants."

Uganda's Anti-Gay Legislation

This, from yesterday's New York Times, is disturbing:  "Resentment Toward the West Bolsters Uganda's New Anti-Gay Bill."  The worst part may be the reminder that "American evangelical Christians played a role in stirring the anti-homosexual sentiment that culminated in the initial legislation in Uganda."  For more on  that  assertion, see this Harper's story from September 2010 on "the American roots of Uganda's anti-gay persecutions."

Enforcing International Law

Paul Hoffman, attorney for the plaintiffs in Kiobel, made this key point early in the oral arguments before the Supreme Court yesterday:

I think one of the most important principles in this case is that international law, from the time of the Founders to today, uses domestic tribunals, domestic courts and domestic legislation, as the primary engines to enforce international law.

This, it seems to me, is something that those who "get" international law understand.  Those who remain skeptical about whether international law is "really law," on the other hand, often appear to miss this point.  Even with the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the European Court of Human Rights, and assorted other international tribunals in existence, few international law cases are heard in international fora rather than in domestic courts.  This is why states ought to--and often do--make international human rights norms part of their own law.  It is why dealing with corrupt leaders who launder money abroad requires something like the U.S. Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative or the French "biens mal acquis" investigation.  And it is why even the U.S. Supreme Court is, from time to time, asked to deal with matters of international law.

Garzón Acquitted

By a 6-1 vote, Spain's Supreme Court has acquitted Baltasar Garzón of abusing his authority by opening up an investigation of crimes against humanity committed during the Spanish Civil War.  This verdict does not set aside an earlier guilty verdict that resulted in Garzón's disbarment.

From Ogoniland to the U.S. Supreme Court

Today the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., a case that has its origins in the hanging of the Ogoni Nine in 1995.  But that story, too, has a history.  It begins with a June 1993 presidential election that returned a mandate for Moshood Abiola.  The result was annulled by the military dictatorship; the subsequent political crisis brought Gen. Sani Abacha to power.  It was Abacha's oppressive rule that led to the hanging of the Ogoni Nine.

But perhaps Abacha's story requires its own historical background, one that would would include Nigeria's colonial past and its struggle to overcome poverty and knit together disparate ethnic groups in the aftermath of independence in 1960.  Or perhaps, as with so much of significance in the world, it all begins with the discovery of oil.

West Africa--and especially the Gulf of Guinea--is among the world's richest oil regions.  Nigeria, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea are major oil producers and, not coincidentally, major centers of political repression and corruption.  Nigeria experienced an almost unbroken string of military dictatorships from 1966 to 1999 before returning, haltingly, to democracy; Angola experienced an extraordinarily destructive civil war from its independence in 1975 to 2002 and operates today with a deeply flawed political system; and Equatorial Guinea has been ruled by two dictators--from the same family--since its independence in 1968.  Several leaders of the three countries have amassed vast personal fortunes while allowing the abject poverty of their citizens to go unaddressed in any meaningful way.

In a state without solid democratic foundations, oil tends to turn control of the government into the one sure path to riches.  Those who rule control oil production contracts; these provide enormous sums of money that, in the absence of transparency and democracy, somehow never make it into the public treasury.  That kind of money is often thought to be worth fighting over, so coups d'etat, attempted coups, civil wars, and other forms of violence--or its opposite, which is severe repression designed to insure against coups d'etat and civil wars--is common.  (In a free-market economy, where oil wealth remains in private hands, direct control of the government is unnecessary, especially where corporate wealth can be used to influence the policy process in a nominally democratic system.)

But back to Nigeria, Gen. Abacha, and the Ogoni Nine.

The most important oil-producing region of Nigeria is the Niger Delta.  Those people living in the region, however, have reaped very few benefits and many hardships from the oil production that goes on all around them.  Natural gas--a by-product of oil production--is flared rather than captured in the Niger Delta, resulting in serious air pollution (and one of the single largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions on the planet).  Rivers and streams have been polluted making fishing, a key source of livelihood, impossible.  Villages have been uprooted and people have been dispossessed to clear areas for petroleum exploration and production.  And, in all of this, very little oil wealth has been returned to the people paying the economic, social, health, and environmental costs of the oil production going on around them.

Imagine BP ignoring the consequences of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.  Now imagine the government deploying the National Guard to keep the people harmed by the oil spill--or merely outraged by it--from interfering as BP and other oil companies continued to operate as if nothing had happened.  This gives a picture of the situation in the Niger Delta, one that Peter Maass has described well in his 2009 book Crude World:  The Violent Twilight of Oil.

Among those protesting conditions in the Niger Delta were members of a group called the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP).  On May 21, 1994, four former leaders of MOSOP were murdered.  The Nigerian government accused nine current MOSOP leaders, including author and environmentalist Ken Saro-Wiwa, of responsibility for the murders.  The nine were tried in a special court--the Civil Disturbance Special Tribunal--under circumstances that Amnesty International condemned as "blatantly unfair."  All nine were convicted and sentenced to death.  In spite of an international outcry, the executions were carried out--by hanging--on November 10, 1995.  A number of witnesses later recanted their testimony saying they had been bribed by the government.  Two claimed to have been promised jobs with Shell Oil in exchange for testimony against the Ogoni Nine.

The international outrage over the executions led to the suspension of Nigeria from the Commonwealth of Nations and variety of sanctions from other quarters.  It may have played a role in the end of military dictatorship in Nigeria with the election of Olesegun Obasanjo as president in 1999.  It also led to two noteworthy human rights cases, one of which never went to trial.

Relatives of Ken Saro-Wiwa sued Shell for its role in his execution, relying on the Alien Tort Statute (ATS) as the legal foundation.  On June 9, 2009, just days before the trial was to have begun in New York, Shell, without admitting liability, agreed to pay $15.5 million to settle the case.  A second ATS case, Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., brought by Esther Kiobel, the wife of another of the Ogoni Nine, Barinem Kiobel, had meanwhile proceeded to trial.  The Second Circuit Court of Appeals, asked to decide whether a corporation could be held liable for violations of "the law of nations" under the ATS, decided in September 2010 that they cannot.  In October 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court granted cert.  Oral arguments were heard this morning.

The early read on the Supreme Court's position is that the five conservative justices are likely to decide that Big Oil cannot be held liable for human rights abuses under the Alien Tort Statute.  If so, an important tool in the global effort to enforce international human rights will have been lost.

Global Governance Monitor

The Council on Foreign Relations has just added a human rights section to its interactive Global Governance Monitor website.  A variety of tools and resources are provided, including an introductory video; a timeline with coverage of significant events from the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 to Secretary of State Clinton's December 2011 speech on LGBT rights; a series of issue briefs on human rights norms, enforcement, and development; a database of documents, international organizations, NGOs, and enforcement mechanisms (the "matrix"); an interactive map; and a list of resources.

 This is nitpicking, perhaps, but the interactive map shows the United States to be among the states that have neither signed nor ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.  This is incorrect.  The Clinton administration signed the Statute on December 31, 2000.  On May 6, 2002, the Bush administration tendered a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan indicating that the United States did not intend to become a party to the agreement, a fact that was designed to release the United States from any obligations it might bear under customary international law as a signatory.  This has been described as "unsigning" the Rome Statute--and it may have had the effect that unsigning would have if it were possible--but it is more accurately described as a stipulation attached to the U.S. signature.

On the whole, the human rights section on the Global Governance Monitor is very helpful, both as a teaching tool and as a research guide.  All parts of the site include links to key institutions and documents, a feature that allows users to dig very deep into the subject.

Deportations

On December 2, 1980, eight months after the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, four American women were raped and murdered in El Salvador.  Three were nuns; the fourth was a lay missionary.  This brutal act was part of an escalating war being waged by the right-wing Salvadoran government against the Salvadoran people and the Catholic Church.

In 1993, a UN-sponsored truth commission issued a report entitled From Madness to Hope:  The 12-Year War in El Salvador:  Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador.  Among its many conclusions regarding various atrocities committed during El Salvador's decade-long civil war was this one:  General (then Colonel) Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova had deliberately covered up facts during earlier investigations to obscure the truth about the murders.  Gen. Vides was head of El Salvador's National Guard when the murders occurred; he later became minister of defense.  The murders, it should be noted, were committed by members of the National Guard.

On Wednesday, in an immigration court in Florida, Judge James Grim ruled that there are valid grounds to begin deportation proceedings against Gen. Vides under a 2004 law that bars those who have committed human rights violations from entering or remaining in the United States.  The case for Gen. Vides' deportation was brought by the Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the urging of the Center for Justice and Accountability.  This is the first time a high-ranking military officer from another country has been subjected to deportation proceedings as a result of responsibility for human rights abuses.

Deportation seems just under the circumstances.

Deportation doesn't seem so just, however, in this next case.

Kosal Khiev was born in 1980 in a refugee camp on the Thai- Cambodian border.  His parents, both Khmer (Cambodian), had fled the genocidal regime of Pol Pot, which, between 1975 and 1979, murdered approximately 1.7 million Cambodians.  In 1981, the family gained the sponsorship of a church in North Carolina and came to the United States seeking political asylum.  After a short stay in North Carolina, the family moved to the projects of Santa Ana, California.

As a teenager, Kosal joined a gang.  In this respect, he was like far too many immigrant children growing up poor in an American city.  At 16, he and other gang members were involved in a shootout at a party.  Tried as an adult for attempted murder, Kosal was sentenced to 16 years in prison.  He served 14 years, during which he discovered spoken word poetry as a means of expressing--and reforming--himself.  Upon his release from prison (never having become a U.S. citizen in spite of having lived virtually his entire life in North Carolina and California), he was deported to Cambodia, a place he had never been before.

In Phnom Penh, Kosal is artist-in-residence with Studio Revolt, the producer of this short film called "My Asian Americana" about Khmer Exiled Americans:

The message that Kosal and others convey in this film is simple:  "I'm an exiled American.  I can't go home."

 

For more about Kosal Khiev, see his website is here--or listen to this Australian radio documentary about him here.

And if you'd like to give the makers of this film a chance to take their message to the White House, you can go here to vote for "My Asian Americana" in the "What's Your Story" Video Challenge being sponsored by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The Stakes in Kiobel

Next Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., a case that raises the question of corporate liability under the Alien Tort Statute for human rights violations.  As Peter Weiss, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, notes in an op-ed in today's New York Times, the Supreme Court granted corporations some of the rights of individuals in Citizens United; to turn around and exempt corporations from the responsibilities that individuals have under the Alien Tort Statute would be a "startling paradox."

Meanwhile, on Friday, former State Department legal adviser John Bellinger argued in a Washington Post op-ed that the Supreme Court should uphold the Second Circuit's decision against corporate liability in ATS cases in order to avoid friction between the United States and other governments that have direct ties to corporations accused of human rights violations, like Royal Dutch/Shell.

Check back for more on Kiobel and the ATS in the next few days.

Heavenly Havoc

Over at Opinio Juris, Kenneth Anderson points out a headline in one of the supermarket tabloids that seems to suggest drone warfare is advancing to a whole new level.

Perhaps this explains Republican claims that Obama is waging a war on religion.

Syria: "Widespread, Systematic and Gross Human Rights Violations"

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic has issued its report to the United Nations Human Rights Council.  The report concludes, among other things, that Syrian government forces "have committed widespread, systematic and gross human rights violations, amounting to crimes against humanity, with the apparent knowledge and consent of the highest levels of the State. Anti-Government armed groups have also committed abuses, although not comparable in scale and organization with those carried out by the State" (A/HRC/19/69, para. 126).  In an apparent reference to the veto exercised on February 4 by Russia and China of a Security Council resolution designed to pressure the Assad regime to negotiate a settlement of the conflict in Syria, the report notes that "diverging agendas within a deeply divided international community complicate the prospects for ending the violence" (A/HRC/19/69, para. 122).

Thai Border Tragedy

A fire has swept through the Umpiem Mai refugee camp on the Thai-Burmese border destroying approximately 1,000 of the bamboo huts that shelter the camp's 17,000 residents.  The Umpiem Mai camp is one of ten operated in Thailand by a consortium of aid groups.  Altogether, an estimated 130,000 people, many of them ethnic Karen people who have fled Burmese government repression, live in the camps.

The fire, which is believed to have started as a result of cooking in one of the huts, was spread by high winds and dry conditions.  There were no deaths, but some children reportedly suffered burns.  The Thai government will not allow those who lost their shelters to leave the camp.  Aid organizations are promising to help refugees rebuild.

Changes in the Burmese government last year together with a peace agreement in January between the government and the Karen National Union, a group fighting for greater autonomy for the Karen people, have prompted hope that refugees will be able to return to Burma (Myanmar).  However, most refugees remain fearful of the Burmese government's intentions.

For a firsthand description of the Umpiem Mai camp--with photos taken last year--go here.