Archbishop Desmond Tutu will participate by video, along with Yasmin Sooka of the Foundation for Human Rights, South Africa, Susan Bissell, Global Chief of Child Protection for UNICEF, Sharanjeet Parmar of Global Rights, and Jens Meierhenrich of the Harvard University Department of Government.

Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow will moderate.  The event will take place in the Ames Courtroom in Austin Hall from 12:00 – 1:00 pm.

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The “Bush Six”, as they have come to known, have been accused of using legal opinions to advise the Bush Administration that it would be acceptable to ignore the Geneva Conventions and narrowly defining which interrogation techniques constituted torture. They are named in a complaint filed by several human rights lawyers.

Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon, who is presiding over the case, is most well-known for indicting Chilean ruler Augusto Pinochet over the objections of prosecutors. However, Conde-Pumpido is Spain’s top law-enforcement official and would have the final say. A formal announcement is expected April 17.

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Spain claims universal jurisdiction over genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity, no matter where the crime occurs. However, this jurisdiction only applies if the crime is not the subject of a legal proceeding in the country in which it occurred. Spanish public prosecutors justified the decision to drop the case based on information that Israel had initiated its own proceedings. However, the case could be reopened if contradicting evidence about Israeli action emerges.

Israeli’s leaders criticized Spain’s decision to prosecute as politically motivated from the beginning. The decision to charge came after the most recent Israeli offensive in Gaza early this year that killed 1,300 Palestinians.  Spain has recognized the political fallout of the legal action and Spanish officials have announced an intention to alter the “universal justice” rule to avoid similar political controversy in the future.

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The court in Abdullahi v. Pfizer, following the Supreme Court’s lead in Sosa v. Alvaraez-Machain, compared the disputed norm with the limited set of 18th century customary international norms over which the ATS was intended to provide jurisdiction. The court held that in order to sustain a  CIL causes of action, the norm must be (1) universal and obligatory in nature, (2) of definite content, and (3) of mutual concern. The majority rejected the District Court’s approach, which examined the norm to see if it were self-executing in the United States.

The Second Circuit found evidence of the specificity and obligatory nature of the norm involved in this case by examining the Statute of the International Court of Justice, the Nuremberg Code, the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

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On February 11, 2008, the Ukrainian arms freighter ‘Faina’ returned to the Kenyan Port of Mombasa with twenty sailors. The ship had been captured by Somali Pirates in the Gulf of Aden region more than four months ago, and was released after a ransom of $3.2 Million was para-dropped onto the ship by its owner. The capture of the ship was of particular concern to the international community because it was carrying arms including T-72 tanks, grenade launchers, antiaircraft guns, and substantial ammunition.  For more information on this story click here.

Pirates have attacked more than 130 merchant ships in the Gulf of Aden region in 2008. In an unrelated event five suspected Somali pirates have been extradited to Netherlands for the failed attempt to hijack the Dutch Cargo Freighter ‘Samanyulo’ on 2^nd January 2009. They will be prosecuted before the Dutch criminal courts and could face up to nine years of imprisonment if found to be guilty with the group leaders punishment extending up to 12 years. For more information on this story click here.     

In another piracy-related event in the Gulf of Aden, the US Navy arrested seven suspected pirates on February 11, 2009, who were attempting to hijack the tanker ‘Polaris’. The seven suspects were taken aboard the USS Vella Gulf, which has been patrolling the area since January 2009 in responnse to the heightened piracy threat in the region. The US Navy intends to hand over the suspects to Kenya, which is setting up a new court system to try foreign pirates. For more information please click here.

His remarks come on the eve of the German Federal Constitutional Court’s decision regarding the ECJ’s 2003 Mangold judgment. In the Mangold case, the ECJ determined that German labor policy violated an EU directive on non-discrimination. The German legislation expressly prohibited age discrimination, while the EU directive permitted it in certain circumstances. As in the famous Solange II judgment, the FCC is again being asked to address the question of EU law’s fundamental supremacy.

Herzog maintains that the ECJ has overreached as both labor market and social policies remain state competencies. As age discrimination in the labor market does not cross borders, he believes that the ECJ has overstepped the boundaries of the principle of subsidiarity. He wrote that past cases have shown that “the ECJ deliberately and systematically ignores fundamental principles of the Western interpretation of law, that its decisions are based on sloppy argumentation, that it ignores the will of the legislator, or even turns it into its opposite, and invents legal principles serving as grounds for later judgments. They show that the ECJ undermines the competences of the Member States even in the core fields of national powers.”

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The ECJ reaffirmed that it cannot intervene in purely internal matters and therefore could not address the benefits accorded to French and Walloon Belgians working in Flemish areas who have not come under the purview of Community law by exercising their right to free movement. However, the Court noted that the scheme restricted the free movement of workers in violation of the EC Treaty by denying benefits to nationals of other Member States working in the Flemish area but living in another region of Belgium, as well as to Belgian nationals in the same position who have exercised their right to free movement. The Court found no legitimate justification for the exceptional treatment. It also suggested the Belgian court itself might have cause to invalidate the remaining portion of the law based on its internal discriminatory effects.

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Rašević and Todović were indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), then transferred to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s national court system for trial.  Although the ICTY still tries the most senior leaders, the ICTY has begun transferring lower-ranking defendants to national courts.  This is seen as significant progress in the ICTY’s attempts to strengthen rule of law by forging a partnership with the national judiciary.  So far, the ICTY has transferred ten defendants in six cases to Bosnia and Herzigovina’s national courts.

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The full text of the decision is available here.