On February 20

On this day in ...

... 1976 (35 years ago today), Dr. René Cassin died in Paris, 88 years after his birth in Bayonne, France. Having earned his Ph.D. in law from the University of Aix-en-Provence in 1914, Cassin was wounded as an infantryman during World War I, then began a career in the teaching and promotion of human rights and humanitarian law. Among his many posts: delegate to the League of Nations, chief legal adviser during World War II to de Gaulle's French government in exile, President of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and President of the European Court of Human Rights. Central to his legacy was his service as the 1st vice chair of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights: along with Chair Eleanor Roosevelt and others, Cassin was instrumental in the drafting and promulgation of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an instrument that he contended "had not just moral, but legal weight" within the system established by the Charter of the United Nations:

It was the development of the Charter which had brought human rights within the scope of positive international law. That being so, it could not be said that the Declaration was a purely theoretical instrument. It was only a potential instrument; but that fact in no way detracted from the binding force of the provisions of the Charter.

(credit for 1947 U.N. photo of Cassin, right, with Roosevelt) Winner of the 1968 Nobel Peace Prize, Cassin is interred in the Panthéon in Paris.

(Prior February 20 posts are here, here, here, and here.)

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

Because of our policy in supporting autocrats in that part of the world, ElBaradei's record of standing up to the U.S. in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion bolsters his credibility within Egypt, where he has not lived for many years.

-- Our colleague Bert B. Lockwood (below right), Editor-in-Chief of Human Rights Quarterly and Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Director of the Urban Morgan Institute for Human Rights at the University of Cincinnati, in an op-ed about Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, Bert's colleague since both were at the Center for International Studies at New York University in the 1970s. Later the Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a Nobel Peace Prizewinner, ElBaradei has emerged as a spokesperson for opponents of the current regime in Egypt. (credit for above left Reuters/Asmaa Waguih photo; video interview here.) Bert's op-ed provides welcome background on ElBaradei -- and acts as a complement to Scott Shane's thought-provoking New York Times piece, "America's Journeys With Strongmen."

Guest Blogger: Erin Daly

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Erin Daly (left) as today's guest blogger.
Erin is Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Faculty Research and Development at Widener Law School in Wilmington, Delaware. She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her J.D. cum laude from the University of Michigan, then practiced 1st Amendment and employment law at the San Francisco law firm of Cooper White & Cooper.
Since entering academia in 1993, she's produced many publications on comparative environmental law, constitutional law, and transitional justice, among them Reconciliation in Divided Societies: Finding Common Ground (2006), for which a Nobel Peace Prizewinner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, wrote the foreword. Co-authoring the book (issued in paperback in 2010) with Erin was Jeremy Sarkin, the South African legal expert about whom we posted yesterday.
Erin has served as a Vice-Chair of the Young Lawyer’s Division Law and Media Committee of the American Bar Association. Earlier this month, Erin was elected the Chair of the Section on International Human Rights of the Association of American Law Schools (a position that IntLawGrrl Christiana Ochoa held a while back). In her guest post below, Erin recaps the Section's "new voices" programs during AALS' 2010 annual meeting, discusses Section plans, and welcomes suggestions for the coming year.
Erin dedicates her post to Coretta Scott King (1927-2006), about whom we IntLawGrrls have frequently posted. She was, of course, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (prior posts) -- and she was also a civil rights and human rights activist in her own right. Today the United States observes Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is, as Erin writes, a holiday that Coretta Scott King

named in honor of her husband, but which is really a testament to her own lifelong commitment to making the world a better place through service to others and to holding up ideals of equality and human dignity, whether in the context of literacy, poverty eradication, or the rights of minorities of all kinds in the United States and abroad. She took on each new challenge with grace and intelligence and continued throughout her life to push for greater rights for all.

(source for 1984 Charles Tasnadi/AP photo of her leading a picket of South African embassy in Washington, D.C.) Today we are honored to include Coretta Scott King in our list of foremothers just below the "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

So should we, perhaps, be content with the virtual moratorium on nuclear testing?
No, because commitments that are not legally binding can easily be violated.

-- Mikhail Gorbachev, the last President of the Soviet Union and winner of the 1990 Nobel Peace Prize. These 2 sentences from Gorbachev's New York Times op-ed pithily point out the importance of treaties, on much the same reasoning as in a prior post by yours truly. Gorbachev's objective? He begins by welcoming the just-before-Christmas approval by the U.S. Senate of the New Start disarmament treaty (prior posts), which Russia's expected to ratify next month. Then he moves quickly to his main goal: secure U.S. ratification as well of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Russia and 34 others of the 44 "nuclear technology holder states" have ratified. The United States is among the holdouts, the Senate having refused to give its advice and consent in 1999. U.S. approval of CTBT would break the logjam, Gorbachev argues, and so make way for "the next step to a world free of nuclear weapons"-- a stated goal of the current American President and many who have preceded him.

No(bel)-shows

Later today the Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded to Chinese writer and political dissident Liu Xiaobo (near left).
It will be the 1st time with "no one present to accept the award since 1936."
Liu Xiabo can't attend.
He's in jail in China.
His wife, Liu Xia (far left), can't attend.
China's put her under house arrest.
Many of their friends and family can't attend.
China won't let them leave the country.
At least 18 countries besides China won't attend.
They've acceded to China's call for a boycott.
United Nations leaders Ban Ki-moon and Navi Pillay won't attend. Pillay, the High Commissioner for Human Rights, says she's got another engagement on this Human Rights Day. That claim's drawn much criticism, and yesterday, she did demand the prizewinner's release from custody.
China has not let up resistance ever since the prize was announced a few months back. Yesterday, it went so far as to block websites to prevent its people from seeing the ceremony.
In short, the Nobel committee's succeeded in shining a light on how far China is from being an open society -- and how far some leaders will go to try to obscure that fact.
Their efforts no doubt will prove fruitless.
As events of the last weeks show, information will out.
Based on the moving poem published in yesterday's New York Times, the voice of the prizewinner (available in book form soon), is one to reckon with. A sample:

hovering within death
a hovering in drowning
Countless nights behind iron-barred windows
and the graves beneath starlight
have exposed my nightmares

Besides a lie
I own nothing

Maybe rename it World Hunger Day?

Happy World Food Day.
In his 1964 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged the world to confront the problem of hunger. He stated:

I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for the minds and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.

(Watch the speech here.)

Almost 50 years later, we are still waiting.

It's not like nobody else noticed that we had a Hunger Problem.

The right to food has been at the heart of international discourse as long as the international community has been discussing human rights:

► Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized the right to food as a basic human right.

► Article 11(2) of the United Nations Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights recognizes the right to be free from hunger. (The United States is still not a signatory to that convention).

► The 1974 World Food Conference declared that "every man, woman and child had an inalienable right to be free from hunger and malnutrition." It committed the international community to eradicating hunger by 1984. (Report available here.)

► The World Food Summit of 1996 set a goal of halving the number of chronically people by 2015.

► The Millennium Development Goals set a target of halving the proportion of people living with food insecurity by 2015. (Notice how much less ambitious the goals have become over time.)

In 1979, the Food and Agriculture Organization declared its intention to designate October 16th -- the date of its founding in 1945-- to be World Food Day. The reason for World Food Day was to "heighten public awareness of the world food problem and strengthen solidarity in the struggle against hunger, malnutrition and poverty." In 1980, recognizing that "food is a requisite for human survival and well-being and a fundamental human necessity" the U.N. General Assembly, in Resolution 35/70, endorsed observance of World Food Day.

Today marks World Food Day's 30th celebration. The clock ticks ever closer to the 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium goals and the World Food Summit Goals.

So, how are we doing?

In its report entitled the State of World Food Insecurity 2010, the FAO states that almost 1 billion people are undernourished. That is more, in absolute terms, than were undernourished in 1979, and roughly the same in percentage terms.

How can it be that in all those years, with all those international proclamations, and all that investment we have made, basically no progress?

Or, phrased differently:

We produce more food today than ever before in the history of the world. So, why are more people hungry today than ever before in the history of the world?

Perhaps the problem is that we are thinking about hunger the wrong way.

This year, the Agricola Medal was given posthumosly to Dr. Norman Bourlag, the man commonly credited with starting the Green Revolution. (prior post) Dr. Bourlag was right when he said that

the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind.

With all due respect to Dr. Bourlag, who devoted his life to eradicating hunger, no amount of new and better technology will solve this problem -- because it is not a food production problem. The problem with Dr. Bourlag's technology-based approach is that today's hunger is a food distribution problem. We already produce enough food to feed all the people on the planet. We just don't use that food to feed the people who are hungry.

Hunger today revolves around the way that global trade is structured. Indeed, since the global food price crisis of 2008, Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the right to food, has been cautioning about the need for structural measures to address food price increases. Even though this year's wheat crop is one of the largest ever recorded, food prices are skyrocketing. The Special Rapporteur identifies main culprits responsible for increasing prices in a time of plenty seem to be commodity speculation on international food markets, disinvestment in social protection schemes, and a global governance scheme that hinders the ability of governments to mitigate price shocks.

Perhaps we should rename it World Hunger Day.

(Personal note: About 195 million children are part of that 1 billion who suffer from food insecurity. As I watched my 4 year old eat her dinner after writing this post, all I could think about was the unbearable pain that a parent unable to feed her child must suffer. I made a donation to Doctors Without Borders' Starved for Attention campaign. Please consider doing something similar.)

On July 31

On this day in ...

... 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Dr. Margaret Joy Tibbetts to serve as U.S. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Norway. Tibbetts presented her credentials on October 6 of the same year, and left the post on May 23, 1969. During that tenure she would "escor[t] Martin Luther King, Jr. and his family when he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1964." She also was quoted in The New York Times story announcing King's award:

As an American and representative of the American people, I want to express joy and gratitude that one of my fellow countrymen has been awarded this prize.

Tibbetts had been on August 26, 1919, in Bethel, Maine, and earned a Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. In 1944 she became a career officer of the U.S. Foreign Service, serving in Washington, London, Brussels -- and eventually as officer-in-charge of the consulate general at what was then Leopoldville, Belgian Congo (today, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo). In 1971 she received the Distinguished Honor Award (ribbon at right), "the highest decoration bestowed by the United States Department of State," and retired from government service. She became a professor, teaching foreign policy, at Bowdoin College near her hometown. Miss Tibbetts, as her obituary referred to her, died in Maine this past April 25, at age 90.

(Prior July 31 posts are here, here, and here.)

On July 19

On this day in ...
... 2005 (5 years ago today), boys aged 18 and 16 were executed by public hanging in Iran (flag at left). The punishment stemmed from allegations that they had sexually assaulted younger boys. A defense lawyer said that according to national child-offender laws, the sentences should have been commuted to 5 years in jail. The death penalties -- banned by the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Iran is a state party -- provoked widespread condemnation. Individuals like Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian attorney and the 2003 Nobel Peace Prizewinner, reiterated criticism of the juvenile death penalty, and some rights groups contended that the boys were punished not for committing assault but for engaging in gay sex.

(Prior July 19 posts are here, here, and here.)

Dark Days in Darfur

(Another in IntLawGrrls' series of posts in connection with the Kampala Conference)

The crisis in Darfur remains on the international criminal justice agenda, not only at the ongoing International Criminal Court Review Conference ongoing in Uganda, but also, sadly, in that Sudanese region some thousand miles to the northwest of Kampala. (map credit)

In Kampala, Uganda

► At the Kampala Conference, a demand that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir be held accountable for crimes committed in Darfur, particularly those against women and children, was made by the Nobel Women's Initiative, an Ottawa-based NGO founded in 2006 by 6 Peace Laureates: Jody Williams of the United States, Shirin Ebadi of Iran, Rigoberta Menchú of Guatemala, Irishwomen Betty Williams and Máiread Maguire, and Dr. Wangari Maathai of Kenya.

► Meanwhile, remarks this past weekend by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni (prior IntLawGrrls post) prompted reports that Bashir had not been invited to the African Union summit scheduled for next month in Kampala, Uganda's capital city. As a Voice of America dispatch explained:

Uganda is a member nation of the ICC, and theoretically would be required to arrest Mr. Bashir if he attended the AU meeting.

But yesterday the BBC reported that after expressions of "outrage" in Sudan's capital, Khartoum, "Uganda's foreign ministry issued a statement to 'clarify' that Mr Bashir had been invited to the summit of African leaders." It's now said that the 1st statement was "misconstrued" from a remark that Bashir is in any event unlikely to attend.

In Darfur, Sudan

► Those events to the southeast occurred against the backdrop of a sharp rise in violence in Darfur itself. Dispatches this week cited a African Union/United Nations hybrid peacekeeping operation in Darfur (UNAMID) report that 600 people died in Darfur during the month of May, "the highest monthly toll since peacekeepers were deployed in 2008."

Casualties spiked after a breakdown in peace talks.

After multiparty elections in April -- Sudan's first in 24 years -- the rebels of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) claimed that the government had launched new raids against it, and thus walked out of negotiations then under way in Qatar. JEM announced on Monday that it intended to continue to boycott the talks, and asserted that its forces are clashing "continuously" with the Sudanese army.

Peace, justice

It is unclear whether the increase of violence and this international pressure are connected. Any possibility of a link certainly plays into one of the deepest fears voiced about the International Criminal Court, and about international prosecutions generally: that prosecutions may upset the extraordinarily fragile peace of a post-conflict nation. This "peace vs. justice" argument often is advanced as a reason that countries are reluctant to prosecute war criminals -- sometimes even decades later, as has been discussed in IntLawGrrls' series on Khmer Rouge accountability in Cambodia.

Risks seem especially high in the case of Darfur.

► On the one hand, the situation in that region of Sudan marks the first time that the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for a sitting head of state. This occurred -- and continues to occur -- amid a crisis that can hardly be said to have reached the "post-conflict" stage. The warrant issued despite the absence of ICC power actually to arrest Bashir, and despite the absence of any U.N. Security Council action to effect that arrest. This standoff may be seen as an invitation to further violence and oppression.

► On the other hand, the prospect of regional policing holds some promise. While Sudan's indicted President (right) has reportedly travelled abroad "in defiance" of the warrant for his arrest, Bashir evidently has avoided ICC member states as destinations. This leaves one with the idealistic thought that perhaps he might dare Uganda and be arrested there next month -- not to mention the overly idealistic dream that his arrest would end the cycle of violence in Darfur.

But, like most issues, the question is not nearly so simple.

While international pressure to prosecute, particularly for crimes of gender-based violence, is a good thing, the international community must also pressure all warring parties in Sudan to come back to the negotiating table. It is only with peace that prosecutions will be meaningful symbols of justice in Darfur.

On April 28

On this day in ...
... 1838, the namesake of a Dutch research consortium familiar to international lawyers all over -- Tobias Michael Carel Asser (left) -- was born in Amsterdam into a family of jurists. He himself became a lawyer, then began teaching law, and eventually devoted himself to international law as a professor at what became the University of Amsterdam. His belief that interstate dialogue would serve global peace led him to spearhead a number of landmark private and public international law conferences at The Hague. Asser also served as a governmental legal adviser and diplomat, inter alia as the Dutch delegate to the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 (prior posts here and here), and he was an inaugural member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. On account of these contributions, Asser shared the 1911 Nobel Peace Prize; he died in 1913 at The Hague. In 1965, the law faculties of universities in Amsterdam, Groningen, Leiden, Nijmegen, Rotterdam, Tilburg, and Utrecht founded the Hague-based T.M.C. Asser Instituut in his name.


(Prior April 28 posts are here, here, and here)

On December 10

On this day in ...
... 1950, Ralph Bunche, a Detroit-born U.N. diplomat whose grandmother had been born into slavery, became the 1st African-American to win the Nobel Peace Prize (prior posts here and here). Today in Oslo, Norway, another African American, President Barack Obama, receives the same prize (prior posts here and here), in a ceremony to be webcast beginning at 7 a.m. Eastern Time. (credit for photo of Bunche, far right, receiving Prize from Nobel Committee Chair Gunnar Jahn)
... 1957, U.S. Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Pennsylvania) was born in Erie, Pa. She was sworn into Congress this past January, the 1st woman ever to represent her district.


(Prior December 10 posts are here and here.)

Peace 2009

"Peace 2009" is the label that the Norwegian Nobel Committee has given to its on-the-web information on today's announcement, reprinted below in full, that U.S. President Barack Obama is the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," with special attention paid "to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons."
The news comes exactly 45 years after the same committee awarded the same prize to another American, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today's news is a most welcome endorsement of the efforts of all in the new administration -- the President, of course, but also many of our colleagues and many others -- who are doing the very hard work of reinforcing the United States' position as a leader in the global community. Obama himself said as much today:

Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.

It is a vision of leadership that seeks to maintain U.S. superpower status, yet accepts the messiness of genuine engagement with our diverse world. Indeed engagement -- even to the extent of risking an occasional loss, as with the failed Olympics bid, or the inevitability of criticism -- is seen in this vision as a sign of strength, a marker that the U.S. role is well earned.
Some are questioning the decision to give this award a scant 9 months after the onset of this Presidency. Such questions ignore just how much Obama and his administration in fact have accomplished in that short time. By way of a few examples, they have:

► Immediately upon taking office, ordered the closure of the detention camp at Guantánamo, and labored since then to make this happen;

► Simultaneously ordered an end to unlawful interrogation practices;

► Reiterated a vision for a nuclear-free world and pressed for nuclear arms reduction through U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, strengthening of the existing nonproliferation framework, and negotiation of a new U.S.-Russia treaty (prior posts here and here);

► Taken part in the 1st high-level face-to-face talks with Iran in 3 decades (prior post);

► Pledged U.S. contribution to global combat against climate change; and

► Joined the Human Rights Council of the United Nations.

Much, of course, remains to be done. Guantánamo is still open, and the ultimate fate of it and other post-9/11 programs is still unclear. The securing of ratification of the test ban and other treaties -- the Women's Convention and the Convention on the Law of the Sea, to name 2 on which we 'Grrls have posted -- has yet to occur. Policy on the International Criminal Court, subject of the forthcoming 2010 review conference in Uganda, remains to be set. Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan pose a host of problems, as do lower-intensity efforts in countries like Pakistan.

Let's hope the administration continues to work to resolve such issues consistent with the "new climate in international politics" that inspired today's award of the Nobel Peace Prize.

(Cross-posted at The HuffingtonPost)

The Nobel Peace Prize for 2009

(full statement respecting today's award, posted above, of the Peace Prize to President Barack Obama)

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2009 is to be awarded to President Barack Obama for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples. The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and work for a world without nuclear weapons.
Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting. Democracy and human rights are to be strengthened.
Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world's population.
For 108 years, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has sought to stimulate precisely that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world's leading spokesman. The Committee endorses Obama's appeal that "Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges."

Oslo, October 9, 2009

End of the Revolution: RIP Norman Borlaug

Nobel Peace Laureate.
Presidental Medal of Freedom winner.
Congressional Gold Medal winner.
National Medal of Science winner.
Father of the Green Revolution.
Creator of the World Food Prize.
The life of Dr. Norman Borlaug (left), who died this weekend at age 95, lent itself to superlatives. Depending on whom you ask, he is either the man who saved a billion lives or the man who unleashed the violence of unsustainable agriculture on the developing world.
Neither caricature does justice to this complex and brilliant man.
Borlaug was an agronomist and microbiologist. His primary claim to fame was his work developing 'the 'semi-dwarf'' plant variety -- plants that had a shorter, more compact stalk that could support a larger head of grain without falling over from the weight. The varieties he developed doubled, and sometimes quadrupled yields. Hence, the "father of the green revolution" moniker.
It is hard to imagine what kind of world we would have today without Borlaug’s pioneering work. Borlaug's high-yielding varieties or their progeny are currently grown on 200 million acres worldwide. Without them, food production might well have lagged far behind a burgeoning global population. (photo credit: the World Food Prize)
To be clear, his work did not usher in a utopia of food security. The problem of inequitable distribution remains as daunting as it ever was. Nevertheless, the Nobel Committee was surely justified when it declared:

'More than any other single person of this age, he has helped provide bread for a hungry world.'

Borlaug’s disease-resistant varieties helped Mexico become self-sufficient in grain. His varieties were then exported to India and Pakistan, where yields doubled. The technology spread to Africa (where it had significantly less success), to the Middle East, and to Latin America. In the process Borlaug built the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre, (CIMMYT) into one of the world’s most important research centers. Now almost 50 years old, CIMMYT remains a key international agricultural research and training institute under the auspices of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research . (photo credit: The Borlaug Institute)
The fairy-tale version of the Green Revolution and of Dr. Borlaug’s work ends here, with the good doctor riding off with his well-deserved 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.
Unfortunately, not everyone lived happily ever after.
The newly developed higher-yielding varieties required tremendous fertilizer and pesticide inputs, and these generated dramatic social and environmental consequences. Fifty years later, we are still coping with that part of Borlaug’s legacy. Overuse of fertilizer has created vast dead zones in aquatic ecosystems. Pesticides routinely poison land, water and people. And, because poorer farmers could not afford the critical inputs, the spread of high-yielding varieties pushed the most marginal of farmers into an even more precarious situation. Borlaug typically dismissed these critiques as the murmurings of the "elite." In his later years, he was a passionate advocate for "the gene revolution," which he saw as the natural successor to the Green Revolution.
Perhaps Dr. Borlaug's death might be a moment for bridging divide in the agricultural world over how best to end hunger. Instead, surely we can all agree that Dr. Borlaug was right when he said:

'[T]he first essential component for social justice is adequate food for all mankind.'

Ebadi on the death penalty

We have been observing a constant deterioration of the human rights situation since 2005. In 2008, for example, we saw that there had been a 300% increase in executions in the prior 3 years! Speaking proportionally, Iran has surpassed even China: there were 355 executions in Iran, a country of 70 million inhabitants; in China, 2,200 executions and 1.3 billion inhabitants. Do the math ....

-- Shirin Ebadi (right), Nobel Peace Prizewinner, in a telephone interview with Le Monde. The Iranian human rights attorney also spoke of the government's closure of her human rights center and harassment of her staff; of the repression in Iran of religious and ethnic minorities such as Bahais, Sunni Muslims, and Kurds; and of how democracy is being "maltreated" in the runup to next month's Presidential election.
With regard to capital punishment, Ebadi not only pointed to overall numbers in the last 3 years, but also to the executions of 26 juveniles and the death row confinement of another 138, 5 of whom are girls. She expressed little hope for reform on this front:

I remain pessimistic, how can I be anything else? We've just learned that last week a couple was sentenced to death by stoning. Anyway, on December 18, 2008, when the U.N. General Assembly adopted a resolution seeking a moratorium on the death penalty, only 46 countries out of 192 voted against it. Among them was Iran ....

As detailed on page 17 of this record of the vote in the General Assembly (above left), also among the countries opposing a death penalty moratorium was China. And the United States.

On February 22

On this day in ...
... 1680, or perhaps 2 days earlier, Catherine Deshayes was burned at the stake on charges of witchcraft on the Place de Grève in Paris. A "sorceress" about 40 years old, the woman known as La Voisin (left) "practised medicine, especially midwifery, procured abortion, and provided love powders and poisons." She was among many persons prosecuted in L'Affaire des poisons, or Poison Affair, a fatally hysteric phase during the reign of Louis XIV.
... 1940, in Lhasa, Tibet, a 4-year-old boy named Tenzin Gyatso (below right) was enthroned as the 14th Dalai Lama. (photo credit) In 1950 he "was called upon to assume full political power as Head of State and Government when Tibet was threatened by the might of China." Four years later he was forced into exile in India, and has not been able to return to his country since. He received the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of

the fact that the Dalai Lama in his struggle for the liberation of Tibet consistently has opposed the use of violence. He has instead advocated peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people.

(Prior February 22 posts here and here.)

On January 27

On this day in ...

... 1914 (95 years ago today), "Lacking any military support," Haiti's civilian President, Port-au-Prince lawyer and Senator Michel Oreste, resigned and went into exile aboard a German ship. At once Marines from Germany, France, and the United States landed in Haiti's capital city. A Haitian military leader was installed as President, but his reign also would be short-lived. (map credit)

... 1904 (105 years ago today), in Paris, France, a son was born to an expatriate couple who in a little over a decade would go on to become icons in the Irish revolutionary movement: Irish-born Major John MacBride, whom the British would execute for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising, and his wife Maud Gonne, described as "an English-born Irish revolutionary, feminist and actress, best remembered for her turbulent relationship with William Butler Yeats." (Had this IntLawGrrl not chosen a certain 16th C. Irishwoman as her transnational foremother, the nod well might've gone to Gonne, ally of IntLawGrrl Fiona de Londras' foremother Countess Markievicz, and the subject of a superb biography by Dr. Margaret Ward.) The couple divorced; their son, Seán Mac Bride, went on to a distinguished global career. Among his achievements: Ireland's Minister of External Affairs and President of the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers from 1949 to 1950, a position from which he spearheaded adoption of the European Convention on Human Rights; a cofounder of Amnesty International; Secretary-General of the International Commission of Jurists; a drafter of the Constitution of the Organization of African Unity; and co-recipient of the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize. Following his death in 1988, he was buried in Dublin cemetery near his wife and son -- and his mother. (credit for mid-20th C. photo of Maud Gonne and Seán MacBride)

On January 11

On this day in ...
... 2007, Molly Ivins (right) published a column entitled Stand Up Against the Surge, in which she urged readers to work to stop the Iraq War (which, in her view, the United States already had lost) by, among other things, taking part in a Washington peace march set for January 27. It would be her last column: the day before that scheduled march, the fiery, Texas-based political commentator, who'd been battling breast cancer since 1999, was admitted to hospital in Austin. She died on January 31, 2007, at age 64.
... 1909 (100 years ago today), in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Elihu Root (then also serving as the 1st President of the American Society of International Law; 3 years later to win the Nobel Peace Prize) and British Ambassador James Bryce signed a treaty establishing mechanisms for pacific settlement of disputes involving waters, and water quantity and quality, at the U.S.-Canada border. The Boundary Waters Treaty is administered by an International Joint Commission, today comprising 5 men and 1 woman -- the latter is Irene B. Brooks (left), U.S. Section Chair.

On January 9

On this day in ...
... 1961, Emily Greene Balch died at a nursing home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 94 years + 1 day after she'd been born into an affluent family in Boston. Her New York Times obituary succinctly told the life story of this American academic/activist/social worker/economist:

Miss Balch lost her college teaching job because she was an outspoken pacifist.
Some years later she won the Nobel Peace Prize for the same reason.

Balch (above right), whose biography marking her 1946 Nobel is here, is the transnational foremother of IntLawGrrls' guest/alumna Chimène Keitner. Balch's IntLawGrrls profile is here. (photo credit)
... 1951, the New York Times reported:

The United Nations today opened the press headquarters at its international enclave on the East River. Simultaneously correspondents filed their first dispatches under the dateline 'United Nations, N.Y.'

Reporters were expected to divide their time between the new building and Lake Success, where U.N. sessions were expected to continue pending full opening of the Manhattan headquarters (left), set for July 1 of the same year.

On December 1

On this day in ...
... 1958 (50 years ago today), the Central African Republic won independence from France. Landlocked and slightly smaller than the state of Texas, the country whose flag is at right has a population of 4.3 million.
... 1948 (60 years ago today), soon after conclusion of a civil war in the Central American country, the President of Costa Rica abolished its military. It never was restored; a Police Guard remains the state's single security force. In 1984 President Oscar Arias Sánchez, who'd go on to win the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize, declared this date el Día de la Abolición del Ejército/Military Abolition Day in Costa Rica( flag at left).