Go On! "Women & War"

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

Days after IntLawGrrls' own D.C. conference marking the 10th anniversary of U.S. Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace, and security, the U.S. Institute of Peace will hold its own series of commemorations at various locations in Washington.
The Institute's colloquium, entitled "Women and War," will be held November 3 to 5, as detailed in the agenda here.
Topics to be discussed: "Gender-Based Violence," "No Peace without Women," "Women at the Center of Peace," and "The Trouble with the Congo."
Confirmed speakers featured at various events include:
Margot Wallström, U.N. Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict; Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues; L. Tammy Duckworth, Assistant Secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs; and Rosa Brooks, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Rule of Law and Humanitarian Policy.
Details and registration information here.

On February 15

On this day in ...

... 1989 (20 years ago today), Soviet troops began leaving Afghanistan, 9 years after they'd entered the country. The retreat was seen as a victory for the mujahideen, whom the BBC described as "Afghan Islamic fighters," and a defeat for the Soviet-backed communist regime in Kabul. Today President Barack Obama mulls stepping up military involvement in an effort to combat the guerrilla movement founded by a man whom the United States has backed when he fought Soviets years ago, Osama bin Laden. But many commentators are wary of this proposal; among those recently expressing concern is our colleague Rosa Brooks. (Associated Press photo credit)

... 1930, Cairine Wilson (right), a social worker and "fluently bilingual mother of eight," was appointed to Canada's Senate soon after the judgment in the Persons case, which established women's right to serve in that body. Wilson was Canada's 1st woman U.N. delegate as well as its 1st Senator. She served in the latter post for 3 decades; no other woman was appointed to join her there for 23 years. Wilson (1885-1962) was known for supporting the rights of refugees, women, and children, Medicare, and reform of divorce laws.

(Prior February 15 posts are here and here.)

Courage in our Convictions

Eagle-eyed blogreaders will notice that a couple of my recent posts (here, and today, here) have been cross-posted at Convictions, the just-launched legal blog at Slate, the online magazine owned by Washington Post.Newsweek Interactive Co. Convictions is self-described as

Slate's blogging destination for smart legal conversation and commentary. Law plays an increasingly important role in American public and private life, defining the myriad ways we interact, transact, relate and dispute with each other. We hope that, by sharing their own convictions on this blog, our contributors will help inform and shape the American conversation about law.

My co-contributors, I'm pleased to announce, include a number of women featured here in the course of this past year:

► IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Dawn Johnsen, Professor of Law and Ira C. Batman Faculty Fellow, Indiana University School of Law, Bloomington. Formerly Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice, Dawn guest-posted last month on the question of investigating CIA waterboarding.

► Rosa Brooks, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., a number of whose Los Angeles Times columns we've featured.

► Dahlia Lithwick, Slate senior editor and legal writer, on whose work we've also posted.

Other women (we make up a third of the Convictions roster; not bad for the outside-the-pink-zone):

► Emily Bazelon, Slate senior editor, with a focus on health, law, and family.

► Judge Nancy Gertner, U.S. District Court, Boston, Massachusetts, who teaches at Yale Law School and practiced in Boston before joining the bench in 1993.

► Deborah Pearlstein, Visiting Scholar, Princeton University's Law and Public Affairs Program. She was the founding director of Human Rights First's Law and Security Program and a speechwriter in the White House of former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

For details on blog organizer Phillip Carter and our other distinguished male colleagues at Convictions, click here.

Kudos to new (Int)Law Deans

Heartfelt congratulations to 2 international/comparative law colleagues who've just been named law school deans.
1st is Nora V. Demleitner (left), who moves on New Year's Day from incoming to permanent Dean at the Hofstra University School of Law, Hempstead, New York.
As detailed here, Nora earned a J.D. from Yale and an LL.M. with distinction in International and Comparative Law from Georgetown, and clerked for the Hon. Samuel A. Alito, Jr., then a federal appellate judge, now a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. She "teaches and has written widely in the areas of criminal, comparative, and immigration law." Recent publications, among them The Avena Case in the International Court of Justice -- Crime and Immigration: Domestic, Regional and International Consequences and Abusing State Power or Controlling Risk?: Sex Offender Commitment and Sicherungsverwahrung, evince that interest.
The 2d, just announced this morning, is David Wippmann (right), Vice Provost for International Relations and Professor of Law at Cornell. He's to be the new Dean at the University of Minnesota Law School. As detailed here, David, who earned a J.D. from Yale and clerked for 2d Circuit Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg, worked as Director of the National Security Council's Office of Multilateral and Humanitarian Affairs from 1998-99. His scholarship focuses on international law, human rights, and ethnic conflict. His most recent publication is Can Might Make Rights? Building the Rule of Law after Military Interventions (2006), co-authored with our colleagues Jane Stromseth and Rosa Brooks.

(Thanks to Brian Leiter for the head's up.)

Dip-ping into humor

ccjhr blog, announced below, is not the only new entry to the international law blogosphere. Our colleagues have noted here and here the launch of "Dipnote: U.S. Department of State Official Blog" (duly added to our "connections" list at right). Its purposes? To "offe[r] the public an alternative source to mainstream media for U.S. foreign policy information" and "the opportunity for participants to discuss important foreign policy issues with senior Department officials."
For our colleague Rosa Brooks (below) the launch provides occasion for a dip into humor -- and not just a humorous poke at the inevitable association of the blog's name, based on the term "diplomatic note," with, as Rosa puts it in her Los Angeles Times column, "'dipsh-' um, 'dipstick.'" For Rosa the launch is a vehicle for announcing the discovery at State of "'a previously unknown but surprisingly effective' method of foreign relations,'" which the official whom she purports to quote "dubbed 'diplomacy.'" A further ersatz quote comes from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

'This is an exciting moment in U.S. foreign policy. Now that we have discovered this innovative new method, "diplomacy," our nation will no longer have to rely exclusively on more traditional forms of foreign relations such as mockery, insults and unilateral military action.'

Kudos to Rosa for trying to add levity to our public discourse. Must say, though, that a quick look at this week's top foreign affairs stories -- "Secret U.S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations," "Bush Defends Interrogations," "From Errand to Fatal Shot to Hail of Fire to 17 Deaths," "I survived Blackwater" -- offers little to laugh about.

Ant bullying

Check out today's column by our colleague Rosa Brooks on the executive detention order that U.S. President George W. Bush issued last week. To the several concerns voiced here, Brooks adds another:

[A] non-U.S. citizen may be secretly detained and interrogated by the CIA -- with no access to counsel and no independent monitoring -- as long as the CIA director believes the person "to be a member or part of or supporting Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated organizations; and likely to be in possession of information that could assist in detecting, mitigating or preventing terrorist attacks [or] in locating the senior leadership of Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces."

The person-believed-to-have-information could be an unwitting eavesdropper unwilling to come forward with what he's heard, or a young relative of an operative, Brooks writes. She reminds that the latter already may have occurred: as detailed on pages 19-20 of the superb NGO report discussed in this post, 1st Pakistan, and then the United States, are said have held in detention-for-interrogation the sons of Al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In Pakistan the boys, aged 7 and 9, reportedly were "mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and say where their father was hiding." Their father eventually was caught and is now at Guantánamo; Brooks reports that the boys' whereabouts are unknown.