Taking a Break

I will be taking a week or so off. Please check back for more posts sometime around the first of the New Year.

Happy Holidays!

Christmas and Politics

James Carroll's column in yesterday's Boston Globe recounts the politics of the Christmas story. Read it here.

Final Exam

Posting has been light recently due to the demands of end-of-the semester grading. For those who didn't have the privilege of taking International Organizations and Law this semester, here's the final exam:

SANTA’S NASTY LITTLE SECRET

On Christmas morning, you are surprised to find a handwritten note inside a present you’ve just opened. It reads:

HELP!!! I am being held along with over 400 of my fellow citizens in a forced labor camp in the Kingdom of North Pole. We are forced to work making toys 364 days a year. We are paid only a few dollars each day. The factory doors are locked from the outside so that we are confined to the workplace 24 hours a day. Although we have beds here and are given food each day, we are treated like prison inmates or slaves. Please, help us.

[signed] Biff
President,
North Pole Elf-Determination Council

As a young international human rights lawyer, you recognize the significance of this plea for help and you decide to investigate further. A quick internet search turns up (1) references to sweatshops in North Pole in each of the last two editions of the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices; (2) a series of three articles in the Washington Post focusing on allegations of serious human rights abuses in North Pole; and (3) a Human Rights Watch report entitled Santa Claus or Satan Claus? The Use of Forced Labor in North Pole. North Pole, you learn, is a state party to each of the major international human rights covenants and their optional protocols.

You attempt to contact Biff by phone, but a receptionist disclaims any knowledge of a person named Biff, an organization called the North Pole Elf-Determination Council, or a toy factory in North Pole. Based on the Department of State and Human Rights Watch reports, you feel certain the factory exists and that the note you have received is not a hoax.

Issue 1. Has a human rights violation occurred in Biff’s case? What specific rights, if any, have been violated? Does your answer to either of these questions change depending on whether the sweatshop in which Biff lives and works is state-owned or privately owned?

Issue 2. Within the human rights system of the United Nations, what are your options for obtaining relief for Biff? What conditions must be satisfied before you can pursue these options?

Your work within the human rights system of the United Nations succeeds in forcing the sweatshop in which Biff works to make some modest improvements in labor conditions. In fact, during one of the brief vacations that workers are given, Biff and several of his colleagues leave North Pole and make their way to the United States where they apply for refugee status. Biff contacts you and urges you to file suit on his behalf against Santa Claus, the operator of the notorious North Pole slave labor camp. Having never been given the pony you always wanted for Christmas when you were a child, you are only too eager to sue Santa.

Issue 3. To which court do you take your case? What argument do you make for the jurisdiction of that court? How would the determination that Santa Claus is the head of state for North Pole affect your legal strategy?

Last-Minute Shopping

Did you know that your Amazon.com purchases can benefit Amnesty International? Enter the Amazon.com web site via AI USA's home page here (look for the blue "Shop at Amazon and Support Amnesty" link) and a percentage of your purchases will be donated to Amnesty.

On the other hand, maybe shopping at Amazon isn't such a good idea for those of us dreaming of a Blue Christmas.

(How's that for a mixed message?)

Letelier's Son Speaks

On Monday, former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was declared fit to stand trial and was placed under house arrest by Judge Juan Guzman. Today in the Los Angeles Times, Francisco Letelier tells the story of his father's death at the hands of Pinochet in 1976. Orlando Letelier, the Chilean ambassador to the United States under President Salvador Allende, whom Pinochet ousted, was killed when his car exploded in Washington, D.C. The orders for the assassination came from Santiago according to Michael Townley, who planted the bomb.

Falluja on Film

The dust hasn't settled yet, but already there are plans for a movie based on the battle for Falluja according to The Guardian. In fact, Harrison Ford has been selected to star in the role of Gen. Jim Mattis who led the aborted assault on Falluja over six months ago.

Asylum in Iceland?

The Washington Post reports that Iceland is offering former chess champion Bobby Fischer asylum should he be deported from Japan. Fischer, an American, has been in jail in Japan since July. He is fighting extradition to the United States where he faces charges of violating economic sanctions against Yugoslavia by traveling there to play a chess match in 1992. Iceland was the site of perhaps the most widely followed match in the history of chess, Fischer's win over the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky.

PTSD

The New York Times has an interesting report on mental health issues facing soldiers returning from Iraq:

An Army study shows that about one in six soldiers in Iraq report symptoms of major depression, serious anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder, a proportion that some experts believe could eventually climb to one in three, the rate ultimately found in Vietnam veterans.

It will be many years before we are able to calculate the real cost of the war in Iraq.

Litigating Global Warming

Is global warming a human rights issue? Those who live on islands vulnerable to rising sea levels think so. So do the Inuit (or Eskimos) who see in the melting of Arctic ice the disappearance of their way of life. Representatives of the Inuit plan to take the issue to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, according to the New York Times:

The Inuit plan is part of a broader shift in the debate over human-caused climate change evident among participants in the 10th round of international talks taking place in Buenos Aires aimed at averting dangerous human interference with the climate system.

Inuit leaders said they planned to announce the effort at the climate meeting today.

Representatives of poor countries and communities--from the Arctic fringes to the atolls of the tropics to the flanks of the Himalayas--say they are imperiled by rising temperatures and seas through no fault of their own. They are casting the issue as no longer simply an environmental problem but as an assault on their basic human rights.

The Inuit will be supported in their petition before the IACHR by Earthjustice (formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund) and the Center for International Environmental Law.

Earlier this year, eight states (including California and New York) filed suit against five major utility companies in an effort to force them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

The right to a livable environment is part of a group of third-generation rights that are increasingly being recognized in international law. If the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights agrees that Inuit rights are being violated by greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, lawsuits may follow. Eventually, courts may compel the United States to act on a matter that neither the Bush Administration nor Congress has been willing to address. It is worth recalling that the civil rights movement in the United States was jump-started by a similar strategy in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.

God's Clock

James Carroll, a columnist for the Boston Globe, has been one of my favorite writers since I read An American Requiem at Dan Caldwell's suggestion a few years ago. His most recent book, Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War, although a collection of newspaper columns, is one of the best things I've read on the Iraq War.

Carroll's column in the Globe today, entitled "God's Clock," is a very eloquent meditation on--and a timely reminder of--the relationship between religion and the transcendent.

Afghan Detainees

Human Rights Watch has uncovered evidence concerning three more deaths of detainees in American custody in Afghanistan, bringing to six the number of detainees allegedly killed by American forces there. The New York Times reports the story here.

Sadly, this makes the comments that Ambassador Pierre Prosper made at Pepperdine last month (casting doubt on the veracity of news coverage of detainee deaths) look more and more like outright obfuscations--to be polite. (Streaming audio of the session at Pepperdine is available here [part 1] and here [part 2]. My comments at the session in response to Ambassador Prosper, in which I note the reporting by the Los Angeles Times of the death of Jamal Naseer in American custody in Afghanistan, begin about 50 minutes into the first part.)

Kyoto, 2004

The United States' position on global warming is getting the cold shoulder from the rest of the world as parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (to which the Kyoto Protocol is an amendment) meet in Buenos Aires. The Los Angeles Times has details:

BUENOS AIRES — The United States is the big odd man out as diplomats, scientists and environmentalists from more than 190 countries gather here at the 10th meeting of the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The focus of the convention is the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which mandates reduction of greenhouse gases that cause global warming and will take effect next year.

Discussions of new limits are expected to begin here when official delegations arrive Wednesday, near the end of the 12-day conference.

Among major industrial countries, only the U.S. and Australia have failed to ratify the accord, which commits signatory nations to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases to 5.2% below 1990 levels by 2012.

Observers here say the U.S. is increasingly being shut out as the rest of the world adopts global mechanisms by which each country will meet its targeted reductions, including one that allows companies to trade reductions in carbon emissions in a kind of global pollution market.

The U.S., which accounts for about a third of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, pulled out of the agreement in 2001.

U.S. officials last week acknowledged a global rise in temperatures caused by human activity but said the increase had not yet reached the "dangerous" levels that equired drastic action.

They reiterated that the Bush administration would not push for U.S. ratification of the accord.

Read the rest here.

Kyoto, 1997

It was on this date in 1997 that over 150 states convening in Kyoto, Japan adopted an agreement to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. The Kyoto Protocol will enter into force on February 16, 2005, ninety days after Russia's ratification put the agreement over the threshold mandated by the treaty. (The agreement specified that entry into force would occur upon the ratifications of a combination of states accounting for over 55 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 1990. Russia's ratification brought that figure up to 61.6 percent.) The thirty industrialized states that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol are committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 5 percent by 2012.

The United States has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

Women, War and the Environment

Here, on International Human Rights Day, are two powerful statements from women. The first, from Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, speaks eloquently of "Trees for Democracy." The second, from Myrna Cunningham, addresses the impact of war on women.

International Human Rights Day

Today marks the fifty-sixth anniversary of the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states in Article 1, "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. " This radical assertion of the fundamental equality of all human beings compels us to look beyond the many characteristics that separate us from one another--sex, race, nationality, age, religion, wealth, education, and more--and to focus on what unites us. It calls us to avoid dehumanizing others--even our enemies--and to work to affirm "the inherent dignity . . . of all members of the human family." It asks us, in short, to do what all respectable religions have always asked their adherents to do.

Mark the day.

• Read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
• Act to protect the human rights of others.
• Learn about human rights abuses in another part of the world.
• Pray for the victims of human rights abuse.

The Genocide Convention

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was approved by the United Nations General Assembly on this date in 1948. It entered into force on January 12, 1951.

Article 2 states:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The United States signed the Genocide Convention on December 11, 1948. Ratification came almost forty years later, on November 25, 1988.

On January 11, 1967, Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin began a personal crusade to secure U.S. ratification of the Genocide Convention. He gave a speech that day on the floor of the United States Senate urging ratification. It was the first of 3,211 original and unique speeches--one each day that the Senate was in session--that he would give over the course of the next nineteen years regarding the need to ratify the Genocide Convention.

Can't Anybody Count?

The British refuse to count Iraqi war dead, too.

Yesterday Tony Blair rejected a call from more than 40 diplomats, peers, scientists and religious leaders who pressed for an independent inquiry for a civilian death toll.

"Figures from the Iraqi ministry of health, which are a survey from the hospitals there, are in our view the most accurate survey there is," he told parliament.

The Guardian discusses the issue of counting here.

Jeannette Rankin

On this date in 1941, one day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war [.wav file]. Congress promptly responded with a resolution that was nearly unanimous in both Houses. The report on the front page of the New York Times on December 9, 1941 tells the story:

Washington, Dec. 8.--The United States today formally declared war on Japan. Congress, with only one dissenting vote, approved the resolution in the record time of 33 minutes after President Roosevelt denounced Japanese aggression in ringing tones. He personally delivered his message to a joint session of the Senate and House. At 4:10 P. M. he affixed his signature to the resolution.

There was no debate like that between April 2, 1917, when President Wilson requested war against Germany, and April 6, when a declaration of war was approved by Congress.

President Roosevelt spoke only 6 minutes and 30 seconds today compared with Woodrow Wilson's 29 minutes and 34 seconds.

The vote today against Japan was 82 to 0 in the Senate and 388 to 1 in the House. The lone vote against the resolution was in the House that of Miss Jeanette Rankin, Republican, of Montana. Her "No" was greeted with boos and hisses. In 1917 she voted against the resolution for war against Germany.

Jeannette Rankin (1880-1973), a pacifist and a leader in the women's suffrage movement, was instrumental in securing the right to vote for women in Montana in 1914, six years before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment gave all women in the United States the franchise. In 1916, Rankin was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Montana becoming the first woman ever elected to Congress. Rankin was defeated in her bid for election to the U.S. Senate in 1918 at least in part because of her vote against American entry into World War I.

For the next two decades, Rankin was active in the international peace movement, particularly through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She ran for Congress again in 1940 on an isolationist platform and was elected to the House. Her vote on December 8, 1941--the lone dissent against war with Japan--was extremely unpopular. She chose not to run for reelection in 1942.

Rankin's commitment to pacifism never wavered. In the 1940s, she became interested in Gandhi's campaign of non-violent resistance. She went to India in 1946, the first of seven trips she would make there during her lifetime. In 1968, at the age of 87, Rankin led 5,000 women--the Jeannette Rankin Brigade--in a march on the Capitol to protest the Vietnam War.

John F. Kennedy said of Rankin, "Few members of Congress have ever stood more alone while being true to a higher honor and loyalty."

The Environment and the Apocalypse

If this speech had been given by anyone else, I might have dismissed it as a diatribe by someone with profoundly anti-religious views. The speaker, however, is Bill Moyers--one of America's most respected journalists and, more to the point in this instance, an ordained Baptist minister with a divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He takes Christianity (and Christians) seriously and rejects simplistic caricatures. For all of these reasons--and others--his comments on receiving the Global Environment Citizen Award from the Harvard Medical School deserve careful attention.

Read the speech here.

Forbidden Photo

This is one of the photos that the Pentagon has asked the media not to show. It depicts the return of American war dead from Iraq to Dover Air Force Base on board an Air Force C-130. The Memory Hole obtained the photo (and 287 others like it) through a Freedom of Information Act request.