Guest Blogger: Rebecca Wright

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Rebecca Wright (right) as today's guest blogger.
Rebecca is the Legal Advisor for the North African Litigation Initiative (NALI) at the Cairo-based Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). NALI aims to raise awareness of the African human rights system in six target countries: Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Sudan. It assists human rights defenders from these countries to bring cases before the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights by holding training workshops and hosting potential litigants at the Ordinary Sessions of the Commission. In her guest post below, Rebecca discusses this work and further describes a recent human rights defenders workshop that NALI hosted in Tunisia.
Rebecca joined EIPR in 2007 after receiving a Harvard Law School Heningson Fellowship. She worked in Egypt for a year before traveling to Afghanistan to conduct research on the cost of conflict for civilians for CIVIC, a Washington, D.C.-based nongovernmental organization. She returned to Afghanistan on two other occasions to work for the Afghan NGO Human Rights Research and Advocacy Consortium on workers’ rights, provincial governance, and women’s leadership. After also working in Qatar and Lebanon, Rebecca returned to EIPR in April 2010 in order to help establish NALI.
Rebecca earned her J.D. from the University of California-Berkeley and her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Oxford. Her dissertation analysed the concept of female heroism in the autobiographies of British suffragists, and today she honors one of those women:

I would like my transnational foremother to be Sylvia Pankhurst [left]. I wrote one of the chapters of my PhD on her. She and the other suffragettes I studied inspired me to become a woman of action and to pursue causes that are just, including those outside the UK.

Pankhurst (1882-1960) joins other IntLawGrrls foremothers -- including her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst (prior posts) -- in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

On April 12

On this day in ...
... 1861 (150 years ago today), about a month and a half after the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln as President, the United States' Civil War began when artillery troops in the newly formed Confederacy, comprising states that had seceded from the Union, opened fire on Fort Sumter, a Union base located on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. (credit for photo of ruins of the fort, now a U.S. monument) The fort surrendered within a couple days and remained a Confederate holding throughout the 4-years-long conflict. Today marks the beginning of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War; well worth a read in this vein is How Slavery Really Ended in America, a New York Times Magazine essay that links a little-known event at the beginning of the Civil War not only to the eventual abolition of slavery in the United States, but also to contemporary popular uprisings in North Africa and elsewhere.

(Prior April 12 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On April 11

On this day in ...
... 1961 (50 years ago today), the trial of Adolf Eichmann began in a national court in Jerusalem on 15 charges of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and war crimes, all stemming from the onetime Nazi bureaucrat's World War II involvement in the Holocaust. (photo credit) As posted here and here, his eventual conviction would be upheld by Israel's Supreme Court, and he would be executed by hanging in 1962. The trial is the subject of a brand-new book. YouTube video of more than 200 hours of trial sessions is available here.

(Prior April 11 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Go On! "Feminist Futures"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

To mark its launch, the brand-new Interest Group on Feminism and International Law of the European Society of International Law will hold a daylong workshop entitled "International Law and Feminist Futures" on Thursday, April 28, 2011, at the University of Leicester in England.
Organizers write:

The event will bring together individuals committed to feminist approaches in order to develop and share their research, generate ideas for future events and collaborations and consider what contribution feminist analysis can make to the future of international law.

Featured will be a keynote address, "The Paradoxes of Feminist Engagement with International Law," by University of Melbourne Law Professor Dianne Otto (left). Panelists from throughout Europe will round out the event.
Details and registration here.

On April 10

On this day in ...
... 1981 (30 years ago today), an inmate on hunger strike in a Belfast prison was elected to the British Parliament. Fifty-two percent of the electorate in the region of Fermanagh and South Tyrone, Northern Ireland, voted for Bobby Sands, who ran as a candidate of the "Anti-H Block" campaign, a term that referred to the section of the Maze prison in "reserved for republicans and loyalists convicted of terrorist offences." (credit for photo of campaigners putting up pro-Sands poster) As stated by the BBC:

In spite of attempts by the European Commission on Human Rights to mediate, Bobby Sands died on 5 May 1981.
He was the first of 10 republican prisoners to die after hunger strikes.
They attracted international media attention and sympathy for the republicans.
The hunger strikes came to an end in October 1981.
However, the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher granted the republicans only a few minor concessions.

(Prior April 10 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

State's new Country Reports

This year's edition of the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, an annual publication of the U.S. Department of State, has just been released and is available online here.

On April 9

On this day in ...
... 1949, the International Court of Justice decided its 1st case. Its judgment on the merits in Corfu Channel (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland v. Albania) held by a vote of 11 to 5 that Albania was responsible for destruction and loss of life stemming from the 1946 incidents in which British destroyers hit mines while traveling in Albanian waters. (map credit) By a vote of 14 to 2, the ICJ further declared that Britain's entry had not violated Albanian sovereignty. The ICJ ruled unanimously that its finding of responsibility constituted satisfaction, and so declined to award damages.

(Prior April 9 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On April 8

On this day in ...
... 1946 (65 years ago today), the League of Nations held its last meeting, 25-1/2 years after its initial session in Geneva, Switzerland. The alliance had foundered with the onset and onslaught of World War II. The United Nations Organization, established by dint of the San Francisco Charter, would assume the intergovernmental security tasks that the League had been designed to discharge.

(Prior April 8 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Go On! Intlaw teaching

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

"Teaching International Law Beyond the Classroom: Engaging Students in Experiential Learning, in Webpages and Blogs, and in Historical and Empirical Research" is the topic of a conference to be held on Friday, May 6, at Pace Law School in White Plains, New York. Cosponsors are the Teaching International Law Interest Group of the American Society of International Law and the American Branch of the International Law Association.
Co-chairing the event are IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Cindy Galway Buys (Southern Illinois) and Thomas McDonnell (Pace). Through the conference they aim

to raise awareness on different modalities of teaching and researching in the area of international law to expand beyond the traditional classroom and the standard law review article. Law schools around the country have initiated international law and human rights clinics; International law faculty have increasingly used blogs and the internet to carry out their scholarly work; and the legal academy has begun to recognize the contribution that history and empirical research can make. This workshop explores each of these modalities and attempts to help the participants expand their teaching and research accordingly.

As set forth in full in the program among the many speakers are a number of IntLawGrrl guests/alumnae addition to Cindy: Laura Dickinson (Arizona State), Peggy McGuinness (St. John's), and Beth A. Simmons (Harvard).
Details and registration here.

On April 7

On this day in ...
... 1930, Vilma Espín (left) was in born Santiago de Cuba, the daughter of well-to-do parents with ties to the Bacardi Rum Company. Among the 1st women in Cuba to earn a chemical engineering degree, Espín did a year of postgraduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning home and becoming active in the antigovernment guerrilla movement in Cuba. (photo credit) In a rebel camp in the Sierra Maestra she met Raúl Castro, whom she soon married. Founder of the Cuban Federation of Women in 1960, she took part in politics thereafter as a member of Cuba's Council of State. Espín died in Havana in 2007.

(Prior April 7 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Guest Blogger: Ruth Wedgwood

We at IntLawGrrls are honored to welcome Ruth Wedgwood (left) as today's guest blogger.
Ruth is the Edward B. Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy and the Director of the International Law and Organizations Program at SAIS, the Washington, D.C.-based Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University.
In addition to teaching at SAIS, Ruth has been a Professor at Yale Law School, a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne), Berlin Prize Fellow of the American Academy, and Charles H. Stockton Professor at the U.S. Naval War College.
From 2002 to 2010 she was a member of the U.N. Human Rights Committee, which monitors state compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; she's also been an independent expert for International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Ruth has served on the Advisory Committee on International Law of the U.S. Department of State, on the Defense Policy Board, and on the CIA Historical Review Panel. She was a U.S. public delegate to Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe and to the Wehrkunde Munich Security Conference. Among many other professional achievements, she is a founding member of Davos World Economic Forum Council on International Law, and has served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as a Vice President of the American Society of International Law, on the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law, as Director of Studies at the Hague Academy for International Law. Currently she is President of the American Branch of the International Law Association; her guest post below seeks participation in and proposals for sessions at ABILA's next annual meeting.
After earning her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was Executive Editor of the Yale Law Journal, Ruth served as law clerk to Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and to Justice Harry Blackmun of the U.S. Supreme Court. She was a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York before entering academia.
Ruth chooses to honor her great-grandmother, Belle Hamer, who, Ruth writes,

taught school in a one-room school house on the Olympic Peninsula in late 1800s, before Washington was a state ... hardly world historical, but my kind of gal ...

(credit for photo of a circa 1904 one-room schoolhouse in Port Angeles, largest city on the peninsula) Today Hamer joins IntLawGrrls' other foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

On April 6

On this day in ...
.. 1896 (115 years ago today), the 1st Olympics in modern times opened in Athens, Greece. The 9-day, multisport meet would enjoy both the largest-ever participation in a sporting event and the largest-ever audience at same. (image credit) Greeks celebrated the marathon victory by one of their own, while a German wrestler/gymnast won the most events, 4. Despite the fact that the event was named after the goddess Olympia, "[w]omen were not allowed to compete at the 1896 Summer Olympics"; however, one woman ran the marathon the next day in an effort to persuade officials to admit women in subsequent Games.

(Prior April 6 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

Go On! Human trafficking conference

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia and other events of interest)

"Which Way Home" -- a reference to the issue of human trafficking -- is the title of the 20th Annual Northern Illinois Law Review symposium to be held will be held April 14 and 15 in DeKalb.
The program will begin with a showing at 7:30 p.m. on April 14 of the Oscar-nominated film of the same name, about which IntLawGrrls posted a while back. The showing will be followed by a question-and-answer session with Sara McDowell, Senior Immigration Attorney for the National Center for Refugee and Immigrant Children, who represented the children in the film.
During the daylong symposium that will follow on April 15, speakers -- including IntLawGrrl Karen E. Bravo and keynote lecturer M. Cherif Bassiouni -- will identify key areas of human trafficking, use of the U.S. court system to combat trafficking, and future policy regarding trafficking. Symposium Editor Emily M. Martin writes:

Although human trafficking is often thought as a distant, international issue, in reality, it is right outside our backdoor. Chicago and Rockford are both human trafficking hubs and Illinois recently passed the strongest anti-trafficking laws in the country.

Details here.

On April 5

On this day in ...
... 1986 (25 years ago today), a bomb exploded in a Berlin discotheque popular with American servicemembers and filled at the time with nearly 500 women and men. Killed as a result of the bombing of the club called La Belle were 2 U.S. soldiers and a Turkish woman. More than 200 persons, among them many Americans, were injured. (credit for photo of plaque commemorating tragedy) The bombing touched off tit-for-tat retaliations: an April 1986 U.S. bombing in Libya that claimed the life of the daughter of Libya's leader, Moammar Gadhafi, followed by the 1988 explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, of a jet carrying many U.S. and British passengers. The incidents have garnered new scrutiny recently on account of Security Council-authorized action against Libya.

(Prior April 5 posts are here, here, and here, and here.)

Guest Blogger: Linda A. Malone

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Linda A. Malone (left) as today's guest blogger.
Linda, as we've posted in the past, is the Marshall-Wythe Foundation Professor of Law and Director of the Human Security Law Program at the College of William and Mary School of Law. She's been a Visiting Professor at the law schools of the University of Virginia, Washington and Lee, Duke University, University of Arizona, and University of Denver, and has taught law at the University of Illinois and University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
An original representative on the Environmental Commission of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), Linda is the author of numerous articles and books in the areas of international law, human rights, and environmental law. A recent example is the co-authored Defending the Environment: Civil Society Strategies to Enforce International Environmental Law (2006). Linda also was the Associate Editor of the Yearbook of International Environmental Law, has served on the Advisory Council to the National Enforcement Training Institute of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and serves on the Board of Directors for the International Society for the Reform of Criminal Law, among many other professional affiliations. In her guest post below, she examines -- against the backdrop of the principle of responsibility to protect -- international responses to the conflict in Libya and to the tsunami in Japan.
Linda was a delegate to the U.N. Conference on the Environment and Development in Rio in 1992, co-counsel to Bosnia-Herzegovina in its genocide case against Serbia and Montenegro before the International Court of Justice, co-counsel to Paraguay in its challenge to the death penalty in Paraguay v. Virginia, and an amicus co-counsel in the U.S. Supreme Court in Padilla v. Rumsfeld (2004) and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006).
In 2009-2010, Linda held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in International Environmental Law at the University of Turin, Italy, and in 1998, she received the Fulbright/OSCE Regional Research Award for her work on women's and children's rights in Eastern Europe. She's served on the Special Subcommittee on the Rights of the Child for the American Bar Association, and she received the Millennium Award of the Virginia Women's Bar Association in 2000 for her contributions to women's rights.
Linda earned her B.A. from Vassar; her J.D. from Duke, where she was Research and Managing Editor of the Duke Law Journal; and her LL.M. from the University of Illinois. She clerked for Judge Wilbur F. Pell of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and practiced law in Chicago and Atlanta before joining the faculty at William and Mary.

Heartfelt welcome!

On April 4

On this day in ...
... 1976 (35 years ago today), the man who'd been a "virtual prisoner" since the Khmer Rouge takeover the previous year, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was forced to resign his position as Cambodia's head of state. Within days Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan (right) would be named "Chairman of the State Presidium," and his colleague, Pol Pot, Prime Minister. As IntLawGrrls have posted in our Khmer Rouge accountability series, Pol Pot is dead, but Khieu Samphan awaits trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. (photo credit)

(Prior April 4 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On April 3

On this day in ...
... 2001 (10 years ago today), in consolidated cases captioned Estrada v. Desierto and Estrada v. Macapagal-Arroyo, the Supreme Court of the Philippines (right) (photo credit) stripped a former President of immunity from suit on charges of corruption, and further recognized the legitimacy of respondent Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (prior IntLawGrrls posts), who had succeeded the former President, Joseph Estrada, in office the previous January. Macagapal-Arroyo would serve until mid-2010.

(Prior April 3 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

On the Job! Open Society Foundation

(On the Job! pays occasional notice to interesting intlaw job notices)

The Open Society Foundation is seeking applications for the post of Senior Project Manager/Senior Attorney, to be based in Budapest, Hungary.
Qualified applicants will have, inter alia, a degree in law or the equivalent and at least seven years’ practical experience in the justice field, including particular experience with complementarity-related, international justice, or rule-of-law development issues.
Application deadline is April 27, 2011; details here.

On April 2

On this day in ...
... 1894, Jeanne Deroin died in England, 88 years after she'd been born into a working-class family in Paris. An embroiderer by trade and "an ardent then disillusioned republican" by politics, Deroin embraced Saint Simonianism in the 1830s and 1840s. Among her inspirations was IntLawGrrls foremother Olympe de Gouges (prior posts). With the ferment of 1848, Deroin became an advocate for socialism and women's rights. A journalist as well as an activist, she was imprisoned for "political conspiracy" in 1850; on release, she eventually fled to England and resumed publishing women's rights tracts. (credit for image, from fine-art print entitled "Women Carrying Jeanne Deroin (1805-94) in Triumph, from 'Les Femmes Celebres'")

(Prior April 2 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

CERD shoehorn fails to fit

Shoehorning the conflict between the Republic of Georgia and the Russian Federation into a race discrimination claim always seemed a bit of a stretch.
Not to say there's no ethnic animus amid the tension that heated into armed conflict a while back. (Prior IntLawGrrls posts available here.) Just that there seemed to be a lot more going on. Still, Georgia's CERD shoehorn -- its effort for secure International Court of Justice review on the basis of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination -- was creative lawyering. The kind of thing that just might work.
In the end, however, not enough judges were persuaded.
The ICJ has ruled against Georgia in the case known as Application of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Georgia v. Russian Federation). Of initial note in the judgment, available here, is the division among judges on the issues presented:
► On Russia's claim that no dispute under CERD Article 22 existed, the vote was 12 judges in favor of the objection, 4 against (among the latter, new Judge Xue Hanqin, of China).
► On Russia's claim that Georgia had not satisfied procedural requirements set out in CERD Article 22, the vote was 10 judges in favor of the objection, 6 against (among the latter, newest Judge Joan E. Donoghue, of the United States).
► On the ICJ's finding that it had no jurisdiction, the same 10 judges voted aye and the same 6, including Donoghue, voted no.
Comment on the full judgment awaits careful reading.