On March 31, 2016, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) acquitted (only available in French) Vojislav Šešelj, former Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia and current head of the Serbian Radical Party. According to the press release, Šešelj faced nine counts, including three counts of crimes against humanity and six counts of war crimes. He was accused of recruiting and arming Serb paramilitary forces who between 1991 and 1993 took part in atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia. According to a news report, the prosecution alleged that Šešelj incited...
International Law in Brief
International Law in Brief (ILIB) is a forum that provides updates on current developments in international law from the editors of ASIL's International Legal Materials.
On April 5, 2016, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled (judgment not available in English) that the execution of a European arrest warrant must be postponed if the conditions of detention in the member state that issued the warrant pose a real risk of inhuman or degrading treatment. According to the press release, the case concerned warrants from Hungary and Romania respectively, which called for the return to the countries of two men who had been located in Germany. The local court in Germany deciding on the execution of the warrants expressed concern that the men might be...
On March 30, 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Armani Da Silva v. the United Kingdom that the U.K. criminal justice and prosecutorial systems had not undermined the investigation into the fatal shooting in the London underground. According to the press release, Charles de Menezes was shot by two London Metropolitan police officers in 2005, who mistakenly believed him to be involved in the July 7 bombings in 2005. While no charges were brought against the individual officers, the police authority was found guilty for “failings in the operation’s planning and...
On March 29, 2016, the European Court of human Rights ruled in Bédat v. Switzerland that the imposition of a fine on a journalist for publishing documents covered by investigative secrecy in a criminal case is compatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. According to the press release, Arnaud Bédat, a Swiss citizen and professional journalist, published an article concerning the live criminal proceedings against a man who had run his car into a large group of pedestrians before throwing himself off a bridge. In the article, Bédat described the events and summarized the...
On March 29, 2016, the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) issued a report finding that the Falkland Islands are located in Argentina’s territorial waters. According to the press release, the Commission referenced the Argentine 2009 submission and clarified that it “had already decided that it was not in a position to consider and qualify those parts of the submission that were subject to dispute and those parts that were related to the continental shelf appurtenant to Antarctica.” According to a news report, this ratifies Argentina’s submission and fixes “the limit of...
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia Convicts Radovan Karadžić (March 25, 2016)
On March 25, 2016 the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted Radovan Karadžić, former President of the Republika Srpska and Supreme Commander of the Bosnian Serb army, of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. According to the press release, the judgment concerned crimes committed between 1992 and 1995 during the armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The specific acts for which Karadžić was convicted include persecution, extermination, murder, deportation, inhumane acts (including forcible transfer), terror, unlawful attacks on civilians...
On March 23, 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Swedish authorities must evaluate the consequences of an Iranian citizen’s conversion to Christianity before refusing his claim for asylum and removing him to Iran. According to the press release, F.G. is an Iranian citizen, who arrived in Sweden in 2009 and claimed asylum, arguing that he had been politically active in Iran in opposition to the regime and had fled the country after being summoned before the Revolutionary Court. In his application, he mentioned his conversion to Christianity, but did not rely on it as grounds...
On March 23, 2016 Pre-Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court (ICC) confirmed seventy charges brought by Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda in the case of Prosecutor v. Dominic Ongwen. According to the press release, Ongwen allegedly served as commander of the Sinia Brigade of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity took place in northern Uganda between July 2002 and December 2005. The charges stem from a series of LRA attacks on camps of internally displaced persons (IDPs). In addition to allegations that Ongwen and his men...
On March 21, 2016, the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo of two counts of crimes against humanity and three counts of war crimes. In addition to the unanimous decision by the three-judge Trial Chamber, Presiding Judge Sylvia Steiner and Judge Kuniko Ozaki both submitted separate supplemental opinions. Bemba was on trial for crimes committed in the Central African Republic between October 2002 and March 2003 when he was President of the Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) and Commander-in-Chief of its military branch. As the press release notes...
On March 17, 2016, the International Court of Justice ruled that is has jurisdiction under Article XXXI of the Pact of Bogotá to determine the exact course of the boundary between Nicaragua and Colombia in the area of the continental shelf. According to the press release, Colombia argued that since the Court decided the issues in its 2012 judgment, Nicaragua’s claim was barred by the doctrine of res judicata. The Court disagreed, noting that the parties attributed different meaning to the operative clause of the 2012 judgment, where it found “that it cannot uphold the Republic of Nicaragua...