On December 14

On this day in ...

... 1955, by Resolution 109, the U.N. Security Council admitted 16 new member states to the United Nations. Simultaneously admitted were Albania, Austria, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Ceylon (today, Sri Lanka), Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Laos, Libya, Nepal, Portugal, Romania, and Spain. The vote was 8-0-3; abstaining were Belgium, China, and the United States.

(Prior December 14 posts are here and here.)

On February 6

On this day in...
... 2000, Tarja Kaarina Halonen was elected Finland’s President. Halonen (left), who had served as the country's Minister of Foreign Affairs since 1995, holds the top post to this day. Just this past Sunday, another woman became leader of a nearby country: Johanna Sigurdardottir is Prime Minister of Iceland. In the words of the BBC, Sigurdardottir (below right) "is the first openly lesbian head of government in Europe, if not the world -- at least in modern times."
... 1946, the judges of the League-of-Nations-founded Permanent Court of International Justice all having resigned 6 days earlier, elections were held for the 1st members of the International Court of Justice, during the 1st session of the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council.

On December 6

On this day in ...
... 1921, for the 1st time, all Canadian women were able to exercise the right to vote (left). However, according to this government website,

some women learned that having the right to vote and exercising it were two different things. One of the difficulties was ensuring names were on voters lists.

Those who were able to vote in that 1st universal-suffrage election chose, among other leaders, Agnes Campbell McPhail, "a country schoolteacher" who ran on the ticket of the United Farmers of Ontario and became Canada's 1st woman Member of Parliament.

... 1917, the Russian Empire of which it was a part having fallen a couple months earlier to the Bolsheviks, the Parliament of Finland approved a Declaration of Independence that had been drafted 2 days earlier by Finnish Senators. In Finland, today is Independence Day, marked by festivities and windows bedecked in the blue and white of the national flag.

Peace Prize goes to peacemaker

What a pleasure to see this year's Nobel Peace Prize awarded to a true peacemaker.
The winner is Martti Ahtisaari (right), the former President of Finland (1994-2000), who for years has done the hard work of diplomacy in the world's trouble spots. To name a few: Northern Ireland, where he served on the commission that secured disarmament there; Indonesia, where he negotiated peace between the government and rebels in the country's Aceh province; and, as posted here, Kosovo, which declared its independence earlier this year. At a Peace Prize press conference yesterday, Ahtisaari noted with approval that on the same day 2 states, Macedonia and Montenegro, had just recognized Kosovo 's statehood. (photo credit)
The Nobel Committee's announcement is in this Reuters video newsclip:

On September 9

On this day in ...
... 1920, in Finland, the Lotta Svärd organization was formally established as a women's voluntary auxiliary paramilitary group. Named after the heroine of a Finnish poem, who continues to fight after her husband dies in battle, the organization continued a tradition begun during the Finnish Civil War and World War I, in which women helped in combat. In World War II the "Lottas," as they were known, helped at hospitals, at air-raid posts (as depicted at right), and elsewhere. "By 1944 it included 242 000 volunteers, the largest voluntary auxiliary organisation in the world, while the total population of Finland was less than four million." (photo credit)
... 1888 (120 years ago today), Chile annexed Easter Island, located 3,700 kilometers west of the mainland. Though several thousand of the indigenous Rapa Nui people once had occupied the island, by then fewer than 200 remained, "since all the rest had been taken to the guano deposits in Peru." The aftermath of annexation and its effects on the remaining indigenous inhabitants, is described here. The island is renowned for giant moai statutes like that at left, today a UNESCO World Heritage site. (credit for 1916 photo)

On this day

On April 3, ...
... 2000, Britain put into effect "controversial plans" to permit asylum seeks to "receive vouchers to buy food and clothes," and further to "disperse asylum seekers around the country." The voucher program would be scrapped in 2002 -- to be replaced by the issuance to asylum seekers of special identification cards.
... 1952, Miina Sillanpää (right) died in Helsinki, Finland. Born Vilhelmiina Riktig in 1866, 1 of a peasant couple's 9 children, she changed her name on becoming a maid in at age 18. In time she worked also as a journalist, and "was an early advocate of women's trade union rights and a staunch supporter of social welfare legislation." In 1907 she was among the 1st 19 women elected to Finland's Parliament (below; photo credit), and she served in that body off and on for nearly 4 decades. In 1926 Sillanpää was elected Minister of Social Affairs, making her Finland's 1st woman government minister.

On December 24, ...

... 1914, in Europe, troops took a pause from the global conflict launched a couple months earlier to declare what's now known as the "Christmas Truce." This pause from the bloodshed of World War I has become the stuff of myth and film, among them Joyeux Noël. Though on many battlefields the truce was in fact less than complete, one commentator writes:

In the public's mind the facts have become irrevocably mythologized, and perhaps this is the most important legacy of the Christmas Truce today. In our age of uncertainty, it comforting to believe, regardless of the real reasoning and motives, that soldiers and officers told to hate, loathe and kill, could still lower their guns and extend the hand of goodwill, peace, love and Christmas cheer.

... 1943, Tarja Halonen (left), President of the Republic of Finland since 2000, and its Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1995-2000, was born in Helsinki. In naming her the world's 50th most powerful woman this year, Forbes pointed to her support in drafting a new European treaty, and added that she

backs policies that focus on human rights and 'international solidarity.' She also opposes Nato membership and has called herself a 'relative pacifist,' where she is against disarmament but is still for a strong military.

Though Halonen was the 1st woman to lead her country or its foreign affairs department, there's been a sea change there, according to Forbes:

In April, Finland appointed the world's most female-dominated cabinet; 60%, or 12 of the 20 ministers, are women.

Reisekarte von Nürnberg

Wish you’d been there:
Just back from a megaconference, Building a Future on Peace and Justice, cosponsored by the governments of Finland, Germany, and Jordan, the International Center on Transitional Justice, and Crisis Management Initiative. Standing in the same courtroom (above) where the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg once tried vanquished Nazis for war crimes, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier opened the event by stating that it was there that Germany began its "return to the community of respected nations."
Conference highlights:
► The insistence on the presence of women at every peace parley, by Elisabeth Rehn (below), who's served as Sweden's 1st woman Minister of Defence and as Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Rehn cited the view of some women she’d met in conflict situations: "‘The men have messed up enough. Now it’s time for us.’" She concluded, "Women have to be at the negotiating table."
► Statements by stakeholders, among them Rwot David Onen Acana II, Paramount Chief of the Acholi people involved in peace talks over Northern Uganda.
► The number and variety of participants, ranging from Prince Zeid Ra’Ad Zeid Al-Hussein, Jordan’s Ambassador to the United States and former President of the International Criminal Court's Assembly of States Parties, to a host of women and men who do humanitarian work in the world’s most troubled regions.
Proceedings are to provide the basis for a 2008 Nuremberg Declaration on Peace and Justice.

Go On! IntLaw Summers Abroad

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest.) Unable to attend this month's AALS/ASIL exploration of international law teaching and writing on account of a summer abroad? Then check out upcoming conferences in Europe:

"Sexual Abuse and Exploitation of Women in Violent Conflict" will be the topic under study June 17-19, at an Amsterdam conference cosponsored by Emory University's Feminism and legal Theory Project and the Netherlands Defence Academy. To begin with addresses by Emory's Martha Albertson Fineman and by Major-General Patrick Cammaert, former Force Commander of the U.N. Mission to the Congo, the conference will feature speakers, military and civilian, women and men, academics and activists, from around the world.

"Building a Future on Peace and Justice" is the project at hand for a 3-day conference that will open on June 25 with a session at the Nuremberg courthouse (left, then and now) where the International Military Tribunal convened 6 decades ago. Cosponsors are the governments of Finland, Germany, and Jordan; plenary speakers form a pantheon of state and international officials working on postconflict and justice. (Yours truly will comment at a "Legal Framework" panel.)

"Criminal Jurisdiction 100 Years after the 1907 Hague Peace Conference" will be examined June 28-30 at the 8th Hague Joint Conference on Contemporary Issues of International Law. Cochaired by Michael Scharf, for the American Society of International Law, and Willem van Genugten, for the T.M.C. Asser Instituut, this too has a rich offering of speakers and topics.

The global race to the bottom: drugging deportees

Mention forcibly sedating deportees, and you may envision extraordinary rendition of blindfolded and shackled terrorism suspects in private aircraft to secret destinations -- but in reality, the practice is much more common and much more widespread. On Wednesday, the ACLU of Southern California publicized its investigation into Homeland Security's forcible sedation of immigrants in order to deport them. The Los Angeles Daily Journal quotes DHS: "[u]nder no circumstances are detainees medicated solely to facilitate transport, unless a medical professional determines that they present a danger to themselves and others," but one ACLU client has no history of mental illness and denies resisting deportation, while the other had a stay of deportation pending his appeal. Sadly, the horrifying practice of medicating detainees against their will for non-medical reasons has already gone global: detention center staff report that Australia has forcibly sedated detainees for deportation since 2000; Japan reportedly injected detainees with drugs and deported them "in a state of trance"; German police forcibly sedated a detainee who then died of heart failure; and even Finland forcibly drugged a Ukrainian family against their will in order to deport them. It seems that many of our peer nations are all too willing to cast aside their human rights obligations in order to keep immigrants out. So how do we stop this race to the bottom? In addition to domestic lawsuits and media campaigns, given the implications for medical ethics, non-state actors might provide a transnational solution: In Australia, for example, the New South Wales Nurses' Association advised its members that "participating in the non-consensual administration of medication to immigration detainees would constitute an illegal act." Perhaps medical associations could work across borders to ensure that doctors and nurses worldwide, consistent with their professional obligations, respect the human rights of immigrants. After all, as one forcibly drugged immigrant eloquently notes, he is "no animal," but a human with rights just like the rest of us.