On February 18, 2015 France’s highest court, Cour de Cassation, overturned the decision of a lower court to extradite Mario Sandoval, a former Argentine police officer who is accused of committing crimes against humanity during Argentina’s “dirty war,” and ruled that the case be reexamined. According to one report, Sandoval’s lawyer indicated “the reversal was on a technicality in the statute of limitations.” Argentina has prosecuted and sentenced various individuals for crimes committed during the dirty war and has sought Sandoval’s extradition since 2012.
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 February 12, 2015, in a Chamber judgment, the European Court of Human Rights (the Court) ruled in Sanader v. Croatia that not providing a defendant convicted in absentia of crimes against humanity a real possibility for retrial is a violation of the right to a fair trial under Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights. According to the press release, based on eye witness testimony, Mile Sanader, a Croatian and Serbian national, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years in prison for taking part in the 1991 shooting of twenty-seven prisoners of...
On February 12, 2015, the United Nations Security Council, acting under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, adopted a resolution targeting the funding sources of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Al-Nusrah Front (ANF) and “all other individuals, groups, undertakings and entities associated with Al-Qaida.” According to a press release, the Council condemned “those buying oil from the groups, banning all trade in looted antiquities from Iraq and Syria, and calling on States to end ransom payments.” The resolution also condemned the “destruction and smuggling of cultural heritage...
On February 11, 2015, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) released a manual on best practices for the referral of international criminal cases to national courts. According to a press release, the “manual documents the ICTR Office of the Prosecutor’s (OTP) experience in securing the referral of ten genocide indictments to national jurisdictions for trial.” Of the ten indictments, eight were referred to Rwanda and two to France. The OTP noted that the “referral of these indictments marked an important milestone in the ICTR’s completion strategy. Without...
On January 30–31, 2015, the African Union adopted, among other documents, a Special Declaration on Illicit Financial Flows, which seeks to address “the increasing scale and extent of Illicit Financial flows from Africa.” The declaration resolved “to ensure that all the financial resources lost through illicit capital flight and illicit financial flows are identified and returned to Africa to finance the continent’s development Agenda.” Estimating that the continent loses US$150 billion annually through such flows, the declaration acknowledged the role played by corruption and poor...
On January 30, 2015, the England and Wales Court of Appeal issued a judgment in GS, EO, GM, & Others v. Secretary of State for the Home Department confirming that the deportation of foreign nationals suffering from serious diseases for which they could not receive healthcare in their home states was not a breach of Article 3 (prohibition against inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) or Article 8 (capacity to form and enjoy relationships and the right to privacy) of the European Convention of Human Rights. Five of the six appellants— nationals of India, Ghana, Jamaica,...
On January 28, 2015, the High Court of Australia issued a judgment in CPCF v. Minister for Immigration and Border Protection holding that the detention of 157 Tamil asylum seekers at sea was legal under Australian law. A Tamil asylum seeker, known as CPCF, brought suit alleging he had been unlawfully detained and wrongfully imprisoned after an Australian border protection vessel intercepted the Indian-flagged vessel carrying him and 156 other asylum seekers and redirected them to India. After Australia was unable to reach an agreement with India about their discharge, the...
On February 6, 2015, the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal issued a second judgment in Liberty and Others v. The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Others, ruling that British intelligence agencies’ interception powers and intelligence sharing arrangements with the U.S. breached human rights law until last year. The Tribunal explained that “the regime governing the soliciting, receiving, storing and transmitting by UK authorities of private communications of individuals located in the UK, which have been obtained by US authorities pursuant to Prism and/...
To meet its obligations under the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, the United States is set to restart the destruction of its chemical weapons in March. According to the Pueblo Chemical Agent-Destruction Pilot Plant in Colorado, a facility built to destroy chemical weapons, there are “2611 tons of mustard agent in artillery projectiles and mortar rounds stored at the U.S Army Pueblo Chemical Depot that will be safely destroyed. After the chemical weapons have been eliminated, the plant will...
On February 3, 2015, a U.S. Federal District Court judge dismissed a suit by the Marshall Islands in The Republic of the Marshall Islands v. The United States of America et al. that accused the United States of breaching “its obligations under Article VI of the [Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons] Treaty by allegedly failing to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures for nuclear disarmament.” The judge ruled that the Marshall Islands lacked standing to bring the suit, the case was “nonjusticiable because it involve[d] a political question,” and the injury claimed...