'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

The wrangling over reparations also helped turn the German people against co-operation with the international system.

-- Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan (right) in a New York Times op-ed marking the recent payment-in-full by Germany of reparations assessed against it at the end of World War I. In the essay Macmillan (prior IntLawGrrls posts) seesaws between the good and the bad, the rightness and wrongness of these reparations -- an ambiguity that, as she notes, persists in postconflict situations to this day.

On this day

On February 28, ...
... 1972, the week-long visit of Richard M. Nixon to the People's Republic of China, the 1st ever by a U.S. President, ended with the signing of the Shanghai Communiqué. In it Nixon and Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai set the groundwork for deeper relations between the 2 countries. During his visit the President also had met Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Tse-Tung; for a detailed account of the visit and all that preceded it, check out Nixon and Mao (2007) by Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan.
... 1971, the all-male electorate in Liechtenstein voted against women's suffrage in the principality, which is situated between Switzerland and Austria. The vote was 1,867 to 1,817. Women would win the right to vote in 1984. (map credit)

On January 18, ...

... 1919, the Paris Peace Conference, which would lead to the Versailles Treaty and others that redrew much of the world's map in the course of settling disputes remaining after the end of World War I, convened for the 1st time. Opening addresses of Allied leaders -- among them the 3 pictured (l. to r.), British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson -- may be read here. A superb study of the conference is Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919.
... 1943, U.S. Rep. Kay Granger (R-Tex.) was born in Greenville, Texas.
... 1978 (30 years ago today), the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain's treatment of Irish interrogees violated Article 3 of the European Human Rights Convention. In my 2004 article entitled Guantánamo, I discussed this judgment in light of the United States' post-9/11 detention policy, as follows:

International instruments evince particular concern that states act humanely toward persons they have detained. Early scrutiny of methods used during questioning of such persons occurred in the landmark decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Ireland v. United Kingdom. In order to achieve “disorientation” or “sensory deprivation” of suspected terrorists, British agents had forced Irish interrogees to stand for hours spread-eagled against a wall, to endure loud noises, or to submit to interrogation wearing a dark-colored hood, sometimes having been denied food, drink, or sleep. The European Court held in 1978 that combined and prolonged use of these techniques “caused, if not actual bodily injury, at least intense physical and mental suffering and also led to acute psychiatric disturbances during interrogation”; therefore, Britain had violated, if not the European Convention’s ban against torture, its equally nonderogable ban against inhuman and degrading treatment.

On June 28, ...

...1919, 5 years to the day after the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand that touched off World War I, delegates convened in the Hall of Mirrors, Palace of Versailles, France, to sign a Treaty of Peace with Germany. Among those signing were Allied leaders Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George, chief negotiators at the Paris Conference that had been in session for months. A superb study of that conference is Paris 1919 by historian Margaret MacMillan (left), Provost of Trinity College in the University of Toronto and Lloyd George's great-granddaughter.
...1945, U.S. Rep. Jane Harman (D-Cal.) was born in Los Angeles.