Please join the Society's International Courts and Tribunals Interest Group (ICTIG) in welcoming ASIL's 2009 Manley O. Hudson Medalist, the Honorable Charles N. Brower, to discuss his significant and wide-ranging practice at the bar with distinguished service, both nationally and internationally, during 30 years in the fields of public international law and international dispute resolution.
At its founding in 1899, the Permanent Court of Arbitration was an innovation and stood unique in the field of international dispute resolution. Today a crowded field of international institutions raises questions about the continued viability and particular role for the PCA.
Customary international law is now coming up in a variety of contexts in U.S. courts, including civil suits under the Alien Tort Statute, the review of military commission proceedings in the "war on terror," and criminal prosecution of piracy. Is customary international law a form of federal law, as claimed by the Restatement (Third) of the Foreign Relations Law of the United States? How does its status in the U.S. legal system compare with the status of treaties? Even if it is not directly applicable as U.S.
ASIL, in cosponsorship with its Lieber Society on the Law of Armed Conflict, will host a discussion of the United States's decade-long experience with military commission proceedings against detainees held at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, featuring Jess Bravin, an award-winning Wall Street Journal reporter and author of The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay. Bravin will summarize the findings in his book, which draws on more than a decade of first-hand reporting at Guantanamo and extensive interviews with insiders in the commission process.
The ongoing trial of Rios Montt represents the first time a national court has tried a former head of state for genocide and war crimes. Guatemala's former dictator Rios Montt and his military intelligence chief, Jose Mauricio Rodriguez, have been on trial since March for the deaths of some 1,700 Maya-Ixil people during the 1982-83 period, when Montt was head of state and defense minister, and the army waged a brutal counter-insurgency campaign in the area.