On February 1

On this day in ...
... 2006 (5 years ago today), asserting the freedom of the press was at stake, 6 newspapers in 4 European countries "reprinted controversial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad which have provoked outrage, trade boycotts and threats of violence towards Danes." The 12 cartoons had been published in several months earlier in "a right-of-centre Danish broadsheet." The controversy has resurfaced at times since; for example, in 2009, when Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was selected as NATO Secretary-General, and just last month, when trial began involving an alleged plot to attack the cartoonist.

(Prior February 1 posts are here, here, and here.)

Fragile peace in Liberia

'There's peace in Liberia, but peace is fragile.'

So says Ellen Margrethe Løj (left), since 2007 the U.N. Special Representative for Liberia. (credit for photo of Løj pinning U.N. medal on Nigerian peacekeeper) Formerly a career diplomat in Denmark, Løj served as the Danish Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2001 until shortly before her appointment to the Liberia post.
Løj's comment was published yesterday, in a San Francisco Chronicle editorial entitled "U.N. role works as peacekeeper in Liberia." The editorial was among several items in the Chronicle's examination of how things stand in Liberia years after the end of active civil war 7 years ago. The series anticipates balloting next year, during which Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (right; prior IntLawGrrls posts), President since 2006, will vie for re-election. Other articles include:
► An overview of post-civil war Liberia;
► Efforts to reintegrate ex-child soldiers;
► The past, present, and future role of women as peacemakers;
► The challenge of disputes over land; and
► Labor at a Firestone factory.
All well worth the read.

Law & migration & mothers & children

What a treat to have moderated the opening session of Uprooted: The International Migration of Children, the symposium that 2 student journals here at the University of California, Davis, School of Law (Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall) -- our Journal of Juvenile Law and Policy and our Journal of International Law and Policy -- cosponsored on Friday. (prior post)
Titled "The International Context that Pushes Migration," the session provided a rich overview of the causes, conditions, and effects on families of transnational migration trends.
1st up was our colleague Chivy Sok (right), whose career in human rights advocacy includes current service as a member of the Steering Committee of the Ginetta Sagan Fund of Amnesty International USA, as well as prior human rights center leadership at Columbia University and the University of Iowa. Chivy told of her own childhood picking onions for hours in U.S. fields alongside others in her Cambodian refugee family. Chivy then placed her experience in context. More than 200 million children labor worldwide, she said. Three-quarters work in agriculture. Agricultural hazards -- injuries from equipment, harms from pesticides -- constitute a leading cause of death among children. Many of these children have no access to education, to health care, even to basic hygiene. Sok pointed to the Children’s Act for Responsible Employment, legislation that U.S. Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Calif.) introduced in Congress last fall, as a potential means to address these problems.
Following Chivy was Jayne E. Fleming (left), Pro Bono Counsel at Reed Smith in San Francisco and the subject of a recent profile in the National Law Journal. (photo credit) Jayne recounted the forces of migration through stories about clients who live and work at a garbage dump in Guatemala. Economic forces of course play a role, she said, adding:

Extreme poverty is absolutely a human rights violation.

Other forces of migration emerged during the session, among them: implementation of the Central American Free Trade Agreement; political violence and armed conflict; family disintegration; sexual exploitation or incest.
Yet another force was at the center of remarks by the session's 3d speaker, Dr. Rhacel Salazar Parreñas (right). Some women migrate not out of sheer desperation, she said, but out of desire to improve their family's economic and social mobility. Professor of American Studies and Sociology at Brown University, Rhacel told what she'd learned her ethnographic research on globalized domestic workers. She focused on how laws break up families, compelling mothers to leave their children behind when go abroad to work. Once there, mothers find themselves infantilized by law -- assigned the legal status not of an employee, but rather of a member of the employer's family. They must depend on employers to treat them well, and they discover, when employers do not, that national labor laws do not protect them. This vulnerable status prevails in countries that pride themselves on human rights records -- Rhacel named Denmark and Sweden in particular -- as well as in those that do not. One reason? A "maternalist ideology" by which "various states are in denial that mothers are leaving the home," and so fail to take measures to protect the migrant domestic workers who care for the home in their stead.

Kudos to these excellent speakers, to journal editors Eve Epstein and Monica Feltz and their staffs, and responsible for putting together this stimulating panel.

(Cross-posted at California-Davis Law Faculty Blog)

On January 27

On this day in ...

... 1950 (50 years ago today), by Executive Order 10099, U.S. President Harry S. Truman declared that the mutual defense plan of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was in effect. (credit for photo of Truman signing NATO treaty in July 1949) The move that prompted diplomats from Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and Netherlands, and Norway to meet at the international conference room of the State Department in Washington, D.C., in order to sign bilateral agreements with the United States that enabled them to receive U.S. military matériel. The total cost of this military aid was set at $1 billion.

(Prior January 27 posts are here and here.)

The Copenhagen Accord: Deal but No Deal

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

After two years of preparation and two weeks of intense negotiations at the COP 15 in Copenhagen, there is no internationally legally binding deal on climate change. This is not exactly a surprise. Countries, particularly the United States, China and Denmark, were careful to set clear expectations that there would be no such deal in the weeks leading up to the COP. It is, however, disappointing, particularly given the urgency facing those who are already feeling the impacts of global warming.
There is the Copenhagen Accord – a summary of political commitments developed and agreed to in the final hours by the ministerial-level leaders of five nations: Brazil, China, India, South Africa and the United States. The text of the Copenhagen Accord recognizes climate change as “one of the greatest challenges of our time,” and notes the political will to take action immediately to keep the global increase in warming below 2 degrees. It specifies targets and deadlines for Annex I and Non-Annex I countries, and commits developed countries to providing $30 billion in funding over the next two years. It also highlights, albeit in vague language, the need to monitor and verify emission reductions – a sensitive point of negotiation between the United States and China.
The Accord is the result of the efforts of a handful of nations. As high-level ministers arrived last Wednesday and Thursday, they began negotiating in an attempt to reach a deal of some kind. Their efforts were heralded by U.N. Assistant Secretary Robert Orr as “the most genuine negotiation I’ve ever seen between leaders.” Yet in their understandable haste, a select few nations engaged in a process that left most countries out, usurping the traditional negotiation process used by diplomats and civil servants. As a consequence, some of those latter countries sought to block the Copenhagen Accord’s formal acceptance.
But the Copenhagen Accord is an outcome – it is something.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said “finally, we sealed the deal,” while also noting the need to translate the Accord into international law next year. President Obama has called for continued confidence-building before a legally binding deal can be reached. Translation: more meetings. Indeed, although the Copenhagen Accord is deemed “operational immediately,” it will require continued multilateral discussions and cooperation for it to take full effect.
But can we afford to continue COP talks?
The cost alone is staggering. Denmark spent an estimated $350 million on hosting the conference, which allegedly racked up a 41,000-ton carbon footprint. The process is also flawed. It is a time-sink – resulting in a two-year lead-up to a two-week meeting that reached a “deal” in the last two days. Tuvalu’s upset during the first week and the temporary withdrawal by several African nations in the second week were symptomatic of a process in which power triumphs over interests. Simply put, there is a deficit of trust. No country wants to make the first move if it means vulnerability. This is why deals are made in side-negotiations where smaller groups of parties find the assurances they need to “get real.” The lesson of COP 15 – the Accord is the result of such a meeting.
Another lesson worth keeping in mind for next year's climate change summit in Mexico City is this:
Climate change is a global challenge of unprecedented scale, complexity and severity, and as such it demands considering a new kind of process for reaching global solutions. The same old multilateral treaty negotiation process that worked so well in the case of the 1987 Montreal Protocol is not sufficient. Among other things, on the issue of climate change there simply is not enough time.

On November 23

On this day in ...
... 2007, Connie Hedegaard (left) became Denmark's Minister for Climate Change and Energy. For the 3 years just before that, Hedegaard served as Minister for the Environment.
A former print and broadcast journalist and a member of the Conservative People's Party, she'd been a legislator from 1984 to 1990. As detailed in a recent New York Times profile, she's now busy getting ready to host the U.N. Climate Change Conference. Called COP15, it's to be held December 7-18 in Copenhagen, the city where she was born on September 15, 1960.

(Prior November 23 posts are here and here.)

On October 1

On this day in ...

... 1989 (20 years ago today), Act No. 372 of June, 1989, to which the Danish monarch, Queen Margrethe II, had given royal assent, took effect. Thus was authorized the Denmark registered partnership, the world's 1st same sex civil union. It permits registration as long as 1 partner in the couple is a Danish national.

(Prior October 1 posts are here and here.)

On July 20

On this day in ...
... 1921, Alice Mary Robertson (near left) became the 1st woman to preside over the U.S. House of Representatives. Having been elected by Oklahoma voters, on March 4 of the same year she'd become the 2d woman ever to serve in Congress (the 1st was Jeannette Rankin, another Republican, about whom we've posted). Of Robertson's politics it's been written:

She opposed feminist groups like the League of Women Voters and the National Women's Party, and voted against bills funding maternity and childcare on the grounds that they were an unwarranted governmental intrusion on personal rights. This earned her the support of the Daughters of the American Revolution, of which she was a member.

(See also Louise Boyd James, “Alice Mary Robertson -- Anti-Feminist Congresswoman,” 55 Chronicles of Oklahoma 454 (Winter 1977-1978).) Robertson served only 1 term, losing her bid for re-election to the incumbent she'd ousted 2 years later. It would not be until the election of Republican Mary Fallin in 2006 that Oklahomans would send another woman to Congress. (credit for 1923 photo of Robertson with 2 later-arriving Representatives, Winnifred Huck (R-Ill.), far left, and Mae Ella Nolan (I-Calif.), center)
... 1940, having been occupied by Nazi Germany in April, Denmark withdrew from the League of Nations.

(Prior July 20 posts are here and here.)

On June 17

On this day in ...
... 1924 (85 years ago today), Althea Simmons (left), who from 1979 until her death in 1990 would lead the Washington, D.C., branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and so serve as the NAACP's chief lobbyist in the capital, was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. She was a graduate of that state's Southern University, of the University of Illinois, and of Howard University School of Law in Washington. According to her obituary, Simmons

successfully lobbied for the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982, the creation of a holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sanctions against South Africa and the subsequent Congressional override of President Ronald Reagan's veto.

After Simmons' death, a tribute to her was read into the U.S. Senate record.

... 1944 (65 years ago today), the birthday of independence leader Jón Sigurðsson, Iceland became independent from Denmark and formed a republic. This day is celebrated every year as Iceland National Day. The Old Covenant of 1262 had established the sovereignty of Norway and ended the independent republic in Iceland. Late in the 14th century, Iceland became a Danish dominion. In 1918, by the Act of Union agreement, Iceland was declared a free and independent state, but the Danish king continued to function as king of Iceland. In a May 1944 referendum, Iceland voted to end the union. (credit for 2007 photo of national day procession in Reykjavík, Iceland)

(Prior June 17 posts are here and here.)

On March 31

On this day in ...
... 1917, the Caribbean isles known then as the Danish West Indies and today as the Virgin Islands were formally transferred to the United States, in exchange for "a U.S. payment to Denmark of $25,000,000 in gold coin." The islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix remain part of the United States to this day.
... 1938, the eldest of what would be 3 daughters was born into "a non-political family in Punjab’s Kapurthala district." The eldest became active in politics following her marriage, and represented India at the U.N. Commission on Status of Women from 1984 to 1989. Since 1998 Sheila Dikshit (left) has served as Chief Minister, or Mayor, of Delhi, India; she also represents her area in her country's legislative assembly.

(Prior March 31 posts are here and here.)

On January 14

On this day in ...

... 1972, the woman born Margrethe Alexandrine Þórhildur Ingrid (prior post) ascended the throne to become Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (left). Despite the "II," it had been quite a while since a Danish monarch bore her name. Indeed, none had been named anything other than Frederik or Christian since 1513 (for good measure, her son, the Crown Prince, is named Frederik André Henrik Christian) -- and none had been a woman since the death in 1412 of Margrethe I, regent and the current queen's namesake. (photo credit)

... 1994 (15 years ago today), in Moscow, U.S. President Bill Clinton, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk signed a Trilateral Statement and Annex. The agreement included U.S. promises to aid the latter 2 countires, as well as promises by all 3 to continue to work to reduce nuclear arsenals, in part by deactivating nuclear warheads in Ukraine (right).

On August 28

On this day in ...
... 1968 (40 years ago today), Chicago police waged a "pitched battle" against anti-Vietnam War protesters just outside the Democratic National Convention hall where, inside, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey was nominated as Democrats' candidate for President. Tactics used by the police drew "scorn and mockery" from "[f]oreign newsmen from East and West."
(photo credit)
... 1943 (65 years ago today), amid anti-Nazi strikes in which Danes had been taking part for a month, the Danish government refused a Nazi ultimatum that the government declare a state of emergency, accepting censorship and summary justice and outlawing strikes. Hours later, the German military imposed its own state of emergency and seized control of the country. (credit for photo of Danish protesters)

On April 13

On this day in ...
... 1933 (75 years ago today), Ruth Bryan Owen (left) became the 1st woman chief of a U.S. diplomatic mission when she was appointed Minister to Denmark. Daughter of 3-time Democratic Presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan, Owen presented her credentials on May 29, 1933 and served until June 27, 1936. During World War I she'd been a member of the executive committee of the American Women’s War Relief Fund in London, England, and served as a war nurse in the Voluntary Aid Detachment in the Middle East. In 1929 she had become the 1st woman Member of Congress from Florida. After completing her mission in Denmark she was a special assistant at the San Francisco Conference that established the United Nations and an alternate delegate to the U.N. General Assembly. She died on July 26, 1954, in Copenhagen, Denmark.
... 1946, on account of the campaigning of Marthe Richard, a onetime prostitute and spy turned politician (shown below pursuing another of her pastimes, aviation), a law that bore her name, which mandated the official closure of all brothels in France, took effect in that country. (photo credit)

On this day

On February 20, ...
... 1969, the International Court of Justice issued its judgment in North Sea Continental Shelf Case (Federal Republic of Germany v. Denmark; Federal Republic of Germany v. Netherlands). In deciding the dispute over boundaries in the region depicted at right the Court, by a vote of 11-6, the Court ruled that the equidistance principle set forth in Article 6 of the 1958 Geneva Convention on the Continental Shelf did not apply, for the reasons that Germany had not ratified that treaty and that the principle did not constitute customary international law. It preferred an equitable apportionment of the territory, and called upon the parties to negotiate in accordance with that guideline. (map credit)
... 1943, the 1st of Norman Rockwell's 4 paintings depicting the 4 Freedoms, which U.S. President Frankin D. Roosevelt had proclaimed in the January 1941 and about which we've posted, was published in the magazine Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" soon was followed by "Freedom of Worship," "Freedom from Want," and "Freedom from Fear." The artists' offer to donate the paintings to the U.S. War Department had been rebuffed.