Guest Blogger: Ioana Cismas

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Ioana Cismas (right) as today's guest blogger.
Ioana is a researcher with the Project on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights in Switzerland. She is further offering legal support to one of the members of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council. She's also been an adviser to the Romanian Minister of European Integration. Ioana has previously worked in the research and policy analysis units of nongovernmental organizations and research centers, focusing on humanitarian engagement of nonstate actors and on corporate complicity in international crimes. As a doctoral candidate in international law at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Ioana is exploring the rights and obligations under international law of religious actors, state and non-state. She aims to propose an accountability framework for religious actors.
Ioana holds a master's degree in international affairs from the Graduate Institute and a double bachelor's degree in political science and sociology from the National School of Political Studies and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania.
Ioana examines the question of remedial secession as it applies to Kosovo in her guest post below. In so doing, she builds on the article she published earlier this year in the Goettingen Journal of International Law. (The GoJIL advisory board includes a number of our European colleagues, including Göttingen's Kai Ambos and Andreas Paulus, judges on Germany's State Court and Constitutional Court, respectively.)
Ioana dedicates her post

to the women of the Balkans, irrespective of ethnicity, nationality, religion and political allegiances, who have 'fought' to live their lives despite the many wars and conflicts.

Heartfelt welcome!

L'Arizona de l'Europe?

Immigrants and their advocates in the United States breathed a sigh of relief on Wednesday as a federal district judge enjoined the harshest provisions of Arizona's draconian new immigration law from taking effect. That same day, across the pond, a human rights NGO spoke out against a "racialized vision of society in which a human group, though heterogeneous, is treated as criminogenic." L'Arizona? Non. La France? Oui.
In response to a riot last week (sparked by the police shooting a man dead) involving fifty travellers in central France, President Sarkozy announced Wednesday plans to dismantle 300 Roma and traveller camps across the country as part of his "war on crime and urban violence". In fine Arizona style, he also ordered the "almost immediate" expulsion of Roma from Bulgaria and Romania who have committed offenses against the public order and promised new legislation to make it easier to deport groups like the Roma for security reasons. (See too migration post below.)
The move has sparked concern on the part of human rights groups about promoting negative perceptions of the 400,000 travellers living in France, 95 percent of whom are said to be French nationals. Sarkozy's Interior Minister's responded by claiming that the measures "are not meant to stigmatize any community, regardless of who they are, but to punish illegal behavior". Evidemment.
And what did the European Commission have to say about all of this? Oui, bien sûr. Ben -- c'est-à-dire, peut être. Agence France Presse first reported that the European Commission had assented to Sarkozy's new policies, quoting the spokesperson for Viviane Reding, the Commissioner for justice, fundamental rights, and citizenship (pictured right) as saying, "European laws on the free movement of European citizens provide EU member states with the right to control their territory and combat crime." That provoked a response from Reding's spokesperson, who stated that AFP had misinterpreted the prior statement, and that the Commission was "neither for nor against" France's proposal to expel Bulgarian and Romanian Roma on security grounds. C'est clair?
The Romanian government, on the other hand, has minced few words in its assessment of France's approach (calling to mind Mexican President Felipe Calderon's response to the Arizona law). After the Minister of Justice declared Romania's readiness to cooperate with France, he noted that "cooperation does not mean using bulldozers to destroy camps and publicly blaming Roma." The Romanian Minister of Foreign Affairs expressed a similar willingness to cooperate, before suggesting that EU member states should be able to address criminal activity without resorting to ethnic stereotypes. He argued that "the solution to the Roma's socio-economic difficulties is social inclusion in the societies in which they live, whether in their country of origin or host state, in strict respect of human rights." Bucharest called for a European solution "to complement national efforts in areas such as education, professional training, health, and housing." On va voir.

(Hat tip to Diane Marie Amann for the Le Monde article; translations, and any errors therein, are mine.)

On April 25

On this day in ...
... 2005 (5 years ago today), the Treaty of Accession of Bulgaria and Romania was signed in Luxembourg, thus setting the stage for the joinder of those 2 countries to the European Union on January 1, 2007. With the addition of Bulgaria and Romania, the European Union comprised 27 member states, as it does to this day.

(Prior April 25 posts are here, here, and here)

On February 16

On this day in ...
... 1933, in Geneva, Switzerland, the foreign ministers of Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia signed the Pacte d'organisation de la Petite Entente, aimed at strengthening economic and political ties among the 3 Central European countries. The treatymakers pledged to act consistently with international instruments, chief among them the Covenant of the League of Nations.

(Prior February 16 posts are here, here, and here)

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 October 23

On this day in ...
... 1941, the World War II atrocity known as the Odessa massacre was under way. It had begun the day before and would last another day, and during that time Romanian forces allied with Nazi Germany would kill, by shooting, hanging, or burning, 25,000 to 34,000 Jewish persons from a part of Ukraine including Odessa and neighboring towns. At war's end a number of those responsible would be tried,convicted, and executed; others served terms of imprisonment.

(Prior October 23 posts are here and here.)

On December 24

On this day in ...
... 1814, British and American representatives signed the Treaty of Ghent in the Belgium city of the same name. Thus ended the War of 1812, an event celebrated in the contemporary drawing at right. (credit) Diplomats had labored 4 months to negotiate the pact; the U.S. Senate would give its advice and consent in February 1815. For the most part the treaty restored U.S.-British relations to what they had been before the war began.
... 1989, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, the deposed President and 1st Lady of Romania, were "shot by a firing squad after a secret military tribunal found them both guilty of crimes against the state." Demonstrations erupted throughout the country, and about 100 persons died before unrest subsided.

On November 21, ...

... 2002 (5 years ago today), the 19 members states then comprising the North Atlantic Treaty Organization voted to invite 7 former Soviet Socialist Republics to join the collective security entity. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania were slated for full admission to NATO in 2004.
... 1967 (40 years ago today), at a press conference, Gen. William Westmoreland, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, assured the public regarding an intervention that had begun 2 years earlier:

I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.

"[M]ost Americans" thus "were stunned when the communists launched a massive offensive," during which they "actually penetrated the ground floor of the U.S. Embassy," during the Tet holiday the following January. The United States eventually withdrew in April 1975.

... 1964, U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) was born in Brooklyn, New York.

Globally Disappeared

Questions've been raised about the accuracy vel non of the term "Global War on Terror" almost since its inception. Is it correct, many ask, to label the campaign a "war"? Can one fight "terror"? Or ought the campaign target, rather, acts of terrorism? Though less has been said about the 1st word, 2 recent reports on persons who've been ghosted into secret detention counsel more consideration of the campaign's "global" nature.
Six NGOS -- Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law, Human Rights Watch, and Reprieve -- focus "Off the Record" on U.S. conduct. The report names more than 3 dozen persons -- including 1 woman and her 3 children, aged 6 months to 7 years -- whom they believe have been detained in secret. "'Enforced disappearances are illegal, regardless of who carries them out,'" said NYU's Meg Satterthwaite on release of the report, which points to violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and of the Convention Against Torture, to which the United States is party, as well as the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance opened for signature in February.
As remarkable as the role of the United States in in this account is the involvement of intelligence agencies from other states. Nearly 2/3 of the seizures cited occurred in Pakistan, where the issue of disappearance has sparked unrest. Other countries of capture: Somalia, Afghanistan, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Sudan, and Georgia.
That last country, of course, is in Europe -- and a report to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe indicates that Georgia was by no means the only European state involved in secret detention. Rapporteur Dick Marty named Poland and Romania as the location of CIA "black sites" for detainees believed to have high intelligence value. Neither country acted alone, in Marty's opinion; to the contrary, he concluded that they and other states aided the U.S. effort within the framework of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization "platform" agreement reached just weeks after the 9/11 attack (¶¶ 72-111). Marty attributed his ability to ferret out facts that states want to keep secret to the "dynamics of truth" -- often, a sense among Europeans that since President George W. Bush conceded the existence of the program he said he'd keep secret, they might as well tell the story, under promise of anonymity, from their perspective. He called for further inquiry, greater accountability, and a return to the rule of law:

We are fully aware of the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the danger it poses to our societies. ... The fight against terrorism must not serve as an excuse for systematic recourse to illegal acts, massive violation of fundamental human rights and contempt for the rule of law. ... [H]aving recourse to abuse and illegal acts actually amounts to a resounding failure of our system and plays right into the hands of the criminals who seek to destroy our societies through terror. ... [I]n the process, we give these criminals a degree of legitimacy -- that of fighting an unfair system .... (¶ 14)

(Next counterterrorism update: the status of accountability, at home and abroad.)