Go On! International Conflict & Negotiation Colloquium at Stanford

Anyone in the Bay Area should check out the Stanford Center on International Conflict & Negotiation's International Conflict Resolution Colloquium. The Colloquium is being convened by Professors Allen Weiner (Law--right); David Holloway (Political Science); and Lee Ross (Psychology).
All Colloquium sessions meet from 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. on Thursday in Room 90 of the Law School.

The schedule is below:

► January 6: Allen Weiner (above right)
Senior Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School
Barriers to Conflict Resolution: The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

► January 13: Richard Goldstone (right)
Former South African Constitutional Court Justice, Visiting Professor, Stanford Law School
South Africa’s Transition to Democracy: The Role of the Law

► January 20: James Fishkin (right)
Director, Center for Deliberative Democracy,
Janet M. Peck Chair in International Communication, Stanford University Deliberative Democracy and Conflict Resolution

► January 27: Christopher R. Hill (left)
Dean, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver,
former United States Ambassador to Iraq
The Iraqi Conflicts

► February 3: Beth Van Schaack (right)
Associate Professor, Santa Clara Law School
Negotiating at the Intersection of Power and Law:
The International Criminal Court and the Definition of Aggression

► February 10: Omar Dajani (left)
Professor of Law, McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific
Shadow or Shade – The Roles of International Law in Palestinian-Israeli Peace Talks

► February 17: James T. Campbell (right)
Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History
Settling Accounts? History, Narrative, and Historical Reconciliation

► February 24: Avishai Margalit (left)
George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study
Sectarianism

► March 3: Christopher Greenwood (right)
Judge, International Court of Justice
International Conflict Resolution and the International Court of Justice

Hope to see you there!

Accountability explored

Kudos to our colleague, Stanford Law's Allen S. Weiner (below left), for dispassionate analysis in The Torture Memos and Accountability, a recent ASIL Insight. (Indeed, down-the-line examination is a hallmark of this feature, making Insights an invaluable resource for anyone trying to separate facts/law from spin on issues of international law). The piece is most timely, given both the efforts to downsize detainee population at Guantánamo about which Naomi Norberg posted yesterday, and the New York Times' lead story yesterday, which asserted: "None of the Justice Department lawyers who reviewed the interrogation question argued that the methods were clearly illegal."
Addressing U.S. criminal law in his ASIL Insight, Allen:
► Explained the significance of the "reasonable reliance" defense of the common law, codified at Model Penal Code § 2.04(3)(b) and accepted in prior federal criminal law precedents. This defense could protect interrogators who, pursuant to Office of Legal Counsel opinions authorizing their behavior, committed acts amounting to torture under the Convention Against Torture and its domestic implementing statute, and that this possibility may underlie the declaration of President Barack Obama that the United States would not seek to prosecute such interrogators. (Prior IntLawGrrls posts here, here, here, and here.) (photos above right from video of interrogation of then-16-year-old Omar Khadr, detailed here and here)
► Confirmed our own conclusion that Obama's declaration does not shield persons who did not rely on the OLC memos, for the simple reason that they wrote those memos. There is no automatic bar to prosecution of lawyers for conspiracy or aiding and abetting torture, Allen explained. But he warned that any such prosecution "could prove difficult," for it would require proof beyond reasonable to doubt "that the purpose of the lawyer's advice was to facilitate conduct that the lawyer knew to be criminal," and such proof likely would be hard to come by.
Turning then to the international arena, Allen:
► Stated on the one hand that if it were refusing to prosecute "on policy grounds" alone the United States might stand in breach of the obligation under Article 7 of CAT -- which it assumed voluntarily when it ratified that anti-torture treaty in 1994 -- to try or extradite a person said to have committed torture. On the other hand, he argued, there may be no breach if the "reasonable reliance" defense grounds the decision.
Other legal considerations yet may prove pivotal. Thus Allen:
► Cited Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the statute implementing them, as well as other U.S. laws proscribing conduct the United States admitted occurred during interrogations. To this could be added the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty to which the United States has been a state party since 1992 and Article 7 of which also unequivocally prohibits subject to "torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
► Noted the potential for other accountability mechanisms in places like Spain, and concluded by reminding that

apart from the question of state responsibility on the part of the United States, it is possible that individual interrogators or lawyers may be subject to criminal prosecution outside the United States.

(The Spanish avenue may face closure, however, as we've posted.)
The Insight underscores that the final chapter in the story of accountability for post-9/11 counterterrorism practices is far from written.

Write On! International Law in A Time of Change

The 104th American Society of International Law Annual Meeting will convene on 24-27 March 2010 in Washington, DC. The program committee welcomes suggestions for innovative panels, round-tables, and debates from ASIL members on the theme “International Law in a Time of Change.” The committee also calls for “New Voices” paper proposals.
Suggestions and proposals should be in by the rapidly approaching deadline of June 19, 2009. Click here for full details and the submission form for panel suggestions. Click here for details and submission forms for “New Voices” paper proposals.
Hari Osofsky co-chairs the program committee (click here for her IntLawGrrls information), along with Russ LaMotte, and Allen S. Weiner.
The Annual Meeting theme addresses significant new or resurgent uncertainties, challenges, and possibilities facing the discipline. Perhaps there's really “nothing new under the sun,” but it feels as if there have never been so many issues of global scope in which law, law-making, legal institutions, and legal interpretation are so inextricably involved. I'll name just a few:
►Global Climate Change (and the regulation of energy production, emissions, and toxic waste disposal);
►The Implementation of Human Rights for All (an old problem, but one that now raises new questions about new duty-bearers (businesses, other non-state actors) as well as actual or perceived tensions with other state priorities);
►Global Poverty (and new approaches to the role of law in the allocation of food, housing, healthcare, education, and other resources);
►Armed Conflict and Terrorism (state abuses of civil rights or civil liberties in response to actual or purported security threats and the efficacy of existing legal norms and institutions in preventing the production, proliferation, threat, or use of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons by state and non-state actors);
►A Global Financial Crisis (and the need to rethink state, transnational, or private regulatory and governance mechanisms);
►New Pandemics and other global threats to health (and the legal norms relevant to public health and security);
►Global Discrimination (how law responds to contemporary forms of race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, religion, and class-based discrimination and related violence);
►The Internet (and related privacy, speech, intellectual property, security, accessibility, and information transfer legal issues).
ASIL’s meeting description indicates interest in a broad range of perspectives on these and other issues:

[T]he 2010 Annual Meeting will consider the extent to which this time of change … does and should impact the nature of international lawmaking. How, if at all, can the model of sovereign and equal nation states consenting to law encompass the increasing roles of subnational, nongovernmental, and corporate actors and the networks interconnecting them? In what ways should the making of treaties and customary international law include new actors and approaches? Which existing and new fora should be available to them? What new international institutions or institutional reforms do contemporary challenges demand? How will the embrace of new institutions and actors – or the failure to embrace them –affect the legitimacy of international law? What dangers or challenges to the international legal system do new approaches to international lawmaking present? Above all, what new substantive norms are required, and how should they be achieved?

IntLawGrrls have had a great deal to say on such issues, so we are likely to be well-represented at the meeting!

Go On! ASIL Leadership California Tour

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest.) California international lawyers will be treated this week to visits from two leaders of the century-old, D.C.-based American Society of International Law: President Lucy Reed (below left), a partner at the New York office of the Freshfields law firm, member of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission, and IntLawGrrl, and Executive Director Elizabeth Andersen (below right). Coordinating the events is ASIL-West, the regional pilot project of which yours truly's a co-chair. Here's the itinerary:

Wednesday, October 1: Sacramento/Davis area

12 noon: Networking International Law, a lunchtime discussion with Lucy Reed and Betsy Andersen at the University of California Davis, School of Law (Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall). Cosponsored by the King Hall International Law Society.

6 p.m.: New Types of International Courts and Tribunals, dinner and discussion featuring Lucy Reed, Betsy Andersen, and Pacific McGeorge Law Professor Stephen C. McCaffrey; moderated by California-Davis Law Professor Andrea K. Bjorklund. At the University of California Davis, School of Law (Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall).

Thursday, October 2: San Francisco Bay Area

12:30 p.m.: Contemporary International Tribunals: From Investment Disputes to War Crimes, lunch discussion featuring Lucy Reed, at Stanford Law School, Palo Alto.

4:30 p.m.: Vice Presidential Debate Party. Begins with pre-debate foreign policy/international law panel featuring Lucy Reed, Betsy Andersen, and 3 former State Department officials now based in the Bay Area: William D. Kissinger, Abraham D. Sofaer, and Allen S. Weiner. Followed by dinner and viewing of debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, respectively, the GOP and Democratic nominees for Vice President. At Munger Tolles Olson law firm in San Francisco. Registration (required) here.

Friday, October 3: Los Angeles

11 a.m.: International Criminal Justice: Does It Work? Public lecture by Judge Theodor Meron of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia, with commentary by General Wesley K. Clark (ret.), former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, moderated by UCLA Law School's David Kaye, at that law school.

Saturday, October 4: Orange County

6 p.m.: Debating International Law Since 9/11: Principled & Pragmatic Controversies, lecture by Richard Falk, Betty & Wylie Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law, Chapman University School of Law, at that law school, located in Orange.

Details and registration for all events here.