Taiwan's New President

The Man of the Moment is Ma Ying-jeou (left), the newly elected president of Taiwan. One of the central issues in the Taiwanese presidential election was the question of China. An NYU and Harvard-educated lawyer, Ma rejects calls for Taiwanese independence. Instead, he advocates greater rapprochement with the mainland, and he has “offered a mechanism and some thoughts on a formula for achieving a peace agreement” with China. One aspect of that rapprochement is for the two countries to establish greater trade and economic ties. Taiwan’s economy is sluggish at the moment, and President Chen Shui-bian's anti-China rhetoric held little sway with the cash-strapped Taiwanese. Can trade lead to a lasting peace between Taiwan and China?

Go On! Commemorating the Anniversary of the 1948 Convention Against Genocide

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest.) Kudos to Rutgers School of Law, Newark, New Jersey, for assembling many top social science and legal scholars for an April 4, 2008, conference devoted to the Convention Against Genocide, which the U.N. General Assembly adopted on December 9, 1948.
The United Nations Genocide Convention: A 60th Anniversary Commemoration will include a keynote by Juan E. Mendéz, President of the International Center for Transitional Justice. In addition, our colleague Karima Bennoune will moderate a "Past, Present, and Future" panel featuring Frank Chalk, Jens Meierhenrich, and Martin Mennecke. Dennis Papazian will moderate "Applied: Case Studies," with talks by Sheri Rosenberg (left), Joyce Apsel (below left), and Marcelo Raffin. IntLawGrrls' own Jaya Ramji-Nogales will moderate the final panel, "Prevention," featuring Roger S. Clark, Helen Fein (right), and Gregory Stanton.
A promising kickoff for this anniversary year of the Convention.