On November 25

On this day in ...
... 1975 (35 years ago today), Suriname won independence, with Dutch consent, nearly 21 years after it had become "an autonomous part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands," and more than 300 years after it had become a colony of that European country. Today the country (map at right), about the same size as the U.S. state of Georgia and located at the northeastern coast of South America, is a republic with nearly half a million inhabitants. Its largest population bloc, at 27% is Hindustani (East Indian).


(Prior November 25 posts are here, here, and here.)

Answer to State Party Puzzler

Answer to puzzler above:

The 107th state party to the Statute of the International Criminal Court is Surinamand the 108th is Cook Islands. Each took the step by way of treaty accession nearly a year ago, on July 15 and 18, respectively.

As our Opinio Juris colleague Kevin Jon Heller has pointed out, with the addition of Suriname last year and Chile this week, "every country in South America is now a a member of the ICC -- a significant accomplishment." And as our commenter Deborah points out below, the accession of Cook Islands was "a very important step to redress the under-representation of Asia and the Pacific in the ICC system." (Thanks for helping us give a correct answer to this puzzler, Deborah!)

On July 17

On this day in ...
... 1998 (10 years ago today), in Italy, at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, delegates to a Conference of Plenipotentiaries voted to adopt the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. As I've written here and here, the statute was approved by an overwhelming margin of 120 to 7, plus a number of abstentions. Despite particularly vocal opposition from the United States, the statute rapidly attained the necessary 60 ratifications, and so entered into force on July 1, 2002. Earlier this week, Suriname became the 107th state party to the ICC treaty. No trial yet has commenced; however, matters are pending with respect to conflicts in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and Sudan. The last matter was made possible when the 3 permanent members of the U.N. Security Council that do not belong to the ICC treaty regime -- not only the United States, but also China and Russia -- refrained from vetoing the 2005 referral of the matter, which pertains specifically to Sudan's Darfur region.
... 1944, napalm was used for the 1st time as a weapon of war. It was dropped by U.S. Army planes onto a fuel depot in St. Lô, France, during World War II. The frequent use of the incendiary chemical in conflicts since then is detailed here. (credit for photo of U.S. riverboat using napalm during Vietnam War)

Thomas, Thomas and Hill

Choosing the subject of a blog post is difficult. On one hand, there’s a plethora of subjects I could describe and analyze, on the other, there’s the challenge of having something original, interesting or knowledgeable to share. On any given day, there are more developments with international law ramifications than I could hope to address even if I blogged daily. For example, as I prepared for today’s post, I mulled several topics: the popular movement in Myanmar and the military's vigorous repression of it; the New York Times' report on the good times rolling in the once would-be breakaway Russian Republic of Chechnya, and a UN Tribunal’s rejection of Guyana's claim for reparations against Suriname. At the same time I was pondering a student’s comment that he felt compelled to study international law “because we seem to hear nothing but bad news every day, and we need to understand what’s going on.” Can someone start a good news channel? So that we don’t learn the names and faces of our neighbors on the planet only when something bad – earthquake, hurricane, coup – is happening to them.
And yet, today I turn to the subject of Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill and Isiah Thomas of the New York Knicks.
Justice Thomas appeared on Sunday's 60 Minutes to publicize the newly issued book which he inveighs once more against his “high tech lynching” in 1991. Professor Hill’s classy rebuttal was published in yesterday’s New York Times. Also yesterday, the Times reported the $11.6 million judgment against Isaiah Thomas and the New York Knicks in much-publicized sexual discrimmination suit. In a deposition given earlier in the proceedings, Thomas appeared to hold the view that black men have permission to address black women as “bitches” and “hos” in a way that white men do not. Everything that I could have hoped to say on the Justice Thomas/Anita Hill matter was said more thoroughly, knowledgeably and piercingly by Professor Sherrilyn Ifill on Blackprof.com.
So this blog post isn’t even about international law. The Justice Thomas/Isiah Thomas news items are coincidentally linked in time. Are they linked in any other way? Do they (depressing thought) signify a non-evolution in the status of black women among their male peers? Or merely completely aberrational circumstances in two vastly different work environments 16 years apart? Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson points to endemic familial dysfunction in the black community. There’s little comfort in the thought that, at the very least, whatever the attitudes of Isiah Thomas toward women, including black women, the consequences of his acting upon those attitudes are more limited in scope than are the potential consequences of the interaction of Justice Thomas’s hurt psyche and his power as a Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.

(photo of Anita Hill courtesy of Brandeis University, where she is Professor of Social Policy, Law and Women's Studies)