Topic 1

            On June 21, 2001, a federal grand jury in the United States indicted 13 Saudi Arabian nationals and one Lebanese national in connection with the truck bombing that killed 19 members of the American military services and wounded nearly 400 others in an apartment building in Saudi Arabia in 1996.  The building was being used as a barracks for U.S. military service personnel.  The bombing allegedly was pursuant to an organized terrorist agenda designed to drive Americans out of the Persian Gulf region.

On May 2, 2001, President George W. Bush announced his administration's intention to deploy defenses against possible missile attacks from states other than those formerly regarded as major threats to the United States. He said that in doing so, "We should leave behind the constraints of an ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty that perpetuates a relationship [with the former Soviet Union] based on distrust and mutual vulnerability."

On April 11, 2001 the US and the EU reached an agreement (the "Agreement") in the decade-long dispute over the EU's banana import regime.  The Agreement requires the EU to abandon its proposal to institute on July 1 a "first-come-first-served" licensing regulation and to move in 2 stages to a tariff-only system by 2006.

 

1)  Introduction

 

On July 28, 2000, the United Nations Economic and Social Council decided to establish, by consensus resolution, a "Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues" as a subsidiary organ of the Council. ECOSOC Res. 2000/22 (available at: http://www.un.org/documents/ecosoc/dec/2000/edec2000-inf2-add2.pdf, pp. 50-52).

2)  Significance

 

            On April 1, 2001, a U.S. reconnaissance turboprop aircraft flying over the ocean at least 50 miles southeast of China's Hainan Island collided with a Chinese jet fighter that had been tracking its movements.  The U.S. aircraft made an emergency landing in China, while the Chinese jet crashed.  Apparently the pilot of the U.S. aircraft did not obtain verbal permission from China to land.  All crew members on board the U.S. aircraft survived the incident in good condition.  The Chinese pilot has not been found and is presumed dead at sea.

 

In a landmark decision which develops international humanitarian law pertaining to sexual violence and enslavement, Trial Chamber II of the International Criminal Court for Yugoslavia (ICTY) on February 22, 2001, sentenced three ethnic Serbs to prison for their abuse of women at a "rape camp" near Foca, a small Bosnian town southeast of Sarajevo.[1]  Dragoljub Kunarac was sentenced to 28 years, Radomir Kovac 20 years, and Zoran Vukovic 12 years.