Human Rights Law Commons^™

Children, Diane Marie Amann

Scholarly Works

This chapter, which appears in The Cambridge Companion to International Criminal Law (William A. Schabas ed. 2016), discusses how international criminal law instruments and institutions address crimes against and affecting children. It contrasts the absence of express attention in the post-World War II era with the multiple provisions pertaining to children in the 1998 Statute of the International Criminal Court. The chapter examines key judgments in that court and in the Special Court for Sierra Leone, as well as the ICC’s current, comprehensive approach to the effects that crimes within its jurisdiction have on children. The chapter concludes with a …

An Unintended Casualty Of The War On Terror, Aya Gruber

Publications

As the dust of the Bush administration's war on terror settles, casualties are starting to appear on the legal battlefield. The United States' human rights reputation and the Supreme Court's international influence lay wounded in the wake of U.S. policies that flouted international law by advocating torture, suborning indefinite detention, and erecting irregular tribunals. Through declining citation, the courts of the world are telling the Supreme Court that if it does not respect international and foreign law, international and foreign courts will not respect it. Some might object that the Supreme Court should not be lumped with the Bush administration …

The Law And Policy Implications Of 'Baited Ambushes' Utilizing Enemy Dead And Wounded, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

When a state's armed forces is engaged in hostilities, how long after an engagement or firefight before the international humanitarian law requirement to search for and care for the wounded and find and bury the dead is triggered? This military practitioner's note discusses the legal and policy implications of 'baited ambushes,' the practice of utilizing wounded and dead enemies as the bait for follow on forces, which are then engaged.

The Cost Of Confusion: Resolving Ambiguities In Detainee Treatment, Kenneth Anderson

Reports

This short policy paper considers US counterterrorism policy with particular attention to treatment of detainees in matters of challenging detention, interrogation, trial of detainees, and release. It analyzes the existing US war on terror and considers future policies that would address both national security concerns and human rights/civil liberties concerns. The paper is written by two experts and advocates in counterterrorism-related issues, coming from the center right and the center left in American politics, as part of a project of the Stanley Foundation, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, which publishes papers by pairs of experts coming from conservative and progressive …

Who's Afraid Of Geneva Law?, Aya Gruber

Publications

According to many internationalists, the terrorism detention cases Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld are exemplary of a movement on the part of the Supreme Court toward greater incorporation of and respect for international law. Recent death penalty cases, statements of individual justices, and the increasing transnationalism of the Court's docket have lead many to believe, as Justice Ginsburg does, that the Court's "island or lone ranger mentality is beginning to change." This Article takes the contrary position that Hamdi and Hamdan are not internationalist because of their meticulous avoidance of the issue of Geneva Convention self-execution. Briefly, the …

The Politics Of The Geneva Conventions: Avoiding Formalist Traps, Rosa Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Geneva Conventions were drafted in 1949, in another world. The world of the Geneva Conventions' "framers" is still familiar to all of us, though increasingly it is familiar from movies and books rather from the evening news or, still less, our own lived experience. The world in which the Conventions were drafted was a world of states: powerful states, weak states, predatory states, law-abiding states, but states all the same. Soldiers wore uniforms designed by their states, carried weapons issued by their states, obeyed orders given by their commanders, and fought against the armies of other states.

Well--most of …

War Everywhere: Rights, National Security Law, And The Law Of Armed Conflict In The Age Of Terror, Rosa Ehrenreich Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Both international and domestic law take as a basic premise the notion that it is possible, important, and usually fairly straightforward to distinguish between war and peace, emergencies and normality, the foreign and the domestic, the external and the internal. From an international law perspective, the law of armed conflict is triggered only when a armed conflict actually exists; the rest of the time, other bodies of law are applicable. Domestically, U.S. courts have developed a constitutional and statutory jurisprudence that distinguishes between national security issues and domestic questions, with the courts subjecting government actions to far less scrutiny when …