'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

Sixty six years since the Holocaust and 17 years after Rwanda, the United States still lacks a comprehensive policy framework and a corresponding interagency mechanism for preventing and responding to mass atrocities and genocide. This has left us ill prepared to engage early, proactively, and decisively to prevent threats from evolving into large scale civilian atrocities.

-- U.S. President Barack Obama, in an August 4 Presidential Study Directive on Mass Atrocities. With an aim toward better U.S. preparation against and prevention of such tragedies, Obama ordered the establishment before year's end of an Atrocities Prevention Board, which is to receive support by an interagency study, the latter to be headed by the Office of the National Security Advisor. Obama explicitly instructed that this study consider recommendations of the Genocide Prevention Task Force, an effort cosponsored by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the American Academy of Diplomacy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace and co-chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and former Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen. (credit for image above of task force's 2008 report) Also of relevance, of course, will be the compilation of genocide prevention norms about which IntLawGrrl alumna Felice Gaer has posted.

And now Syria?

"Why haven't we heard anything about a Security Council referral of the Syria situation?" I asked an audience earlier this week.
"Syria situation" referred, of course, to President Bashar al-Assad, whose "massive crackdown" on protests in Syria reportedly has caused the deaths of more than "1,700, mostly protesters," plus the arrests or disappearances of "well over 10,000 people."
My question came toward the end of my talk entitled "International Criminal Tribunals and International Politics," part of the kickoff plenary of this week's global criminal justice conference in Ottawa, Canada.
Among the issues I'd addressed was the Libya box in which the International Criminal Court and the U.N. Security Council seem to have squeezed themselves:
► In February, the Council unanimously set the ICC in motion by referring to it allegations of unlawful killings of Libyan civilians.
► 4 months and 1 day later -- warp speed for the ICC-- Pre-Trial Chamber I issued arrest warrants, as requested by the prosecution, against Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi and 2 others.
► In July, 3 of the P-5 Security Council members -- France, the United States, and Britain -- indicated that they'd permit Qaddafi to escape the ICC prosecution, as long as he left office and remained in Libya.
► Immediately after that, a spokesperson for the Court insisted that the warrants must be executed, a position consistent with a 2007 Office of the Prosecution policy paper that contends the prosecutor has no power to withdraw in these circumstances.
Given the constraints of this justice/policy box, it seems unlikely these same actors would follow the ICC path with respect to Syria.
So I surmised in Ottawa.
Appears I may have surmised too soon.
Yesterday the Los Angeles Times' Borzou Daragahi reported that, according to an "jurist" and a "diplomat," both unnamed, "[a]t least one Western government is bankrolling a project to gather evidence" against Assad. The jurist reportedly is "assembling testimony from Syrian refugees that conforms to standards of international law necessary to sustain a war crimes trial at the International Criminal Court."
The diplomat, Daragahi wrote, "stressed that no decision had been made among diplomats to press the Security Council" -- though 2 erstwhile officials, U.S. Secretary of State (left) Madeleine Albright and her Jordanian counterpart, called for a Council referral of Syria to the ICC in a June 30 op-ed.
The prospect raises concerns. Concerns about:
► The capacity of the ICC to take on yet another fraught situation, against an incumbent head of state, even as violence continues;
► The wisdom of asking the Court to do just that;
► The intentions of Security Council members in inviting arrest warrants yet, apparently, remaining open to negotiated exile; and
► The advisability of an ICC policy that limits its own discretion in such a volatile international arena.

Remembering Beijing: The Ferraro Factor

(Thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post)

Geraldine A. Ferraro, who passed away this weekend, is a symbol of women’s rights advocacy.
As America’s first female candidate of a major party for vice-president, she broke barriers. But readers of IntLawGrrls may not know how actively and directly she influenced women’s rights issues in the international legal context as well.
Appalled by televised reports about the use of rape as a weapon of war by Serbs in the Bosnian conflict, Gerry contacted Madeleine Albright to ask what the new Clinton Administration was doing about it. She was immediately asked to join the Administration’s first delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, in February 1993, where she helped convince Member States to adopt a separate resolution addressing rape in war.
As Gerry told it, accomplishing this task required her to conduct gender-sensitivity training, too. For example, she found herself telling the male diplomats from the Islamic Conference that they needed to recognize that such sexual violence was not so much an insult to THEIR ‘honor’ (which was all they were prepared to declare) but rather a very real lasting physical and psychological abuse of the women who were victimized. Gerry emphasized that something serious had to be done by the Commission to name it, stop it, punish the perpetrators and aid the survivors. As a result, the Commission adopted a resolution that called for ‘joint and separate action to end this despicable practice,’ as well as for investigations, accountability and assistance to the victims.
Later that year, the protection of women’s rights was affirmed as a major focus of the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna – only a few hundred miles from Bosnia itself.
Gerry was then appointed to head the US delegation to the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva as Ambassador. After she took the reins of the delegation for its 1994 session, the UN created the post of Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, with a mandate to investigate and intervene to stop abuses worldwide. Additionally, at Gerry’s direction, attention to women’s rights and a gender perspective was incorporated into UN resolutions authorizing many other investigations into human rights abuses.
The following year, after setbacks at a spring Preparatory Conference (“Prepcon”), women advocates realized it was urgent to have strong US leadership on women’s human rights issues as a part of the negotiating team for the upcoming Beijing World Conference on Women, scheduled for September 1995. The World Conference was under attack from various quarters – representatives of the Vatican and Islamic countries had worked vigorously at the Prepcon to place large portions of the draft Platform for Action into brackets (meaning they would remain open to negotiation) and had added proposals challenging the universality of human rights. Some opponents of the Conference offered the concept of ‘human dignity’ as an alternative to that of equal rights (i.e., women might have dignity but may not have equal rights). Others demanded recognition of parental rights and duties rather than the human rights of women and girls, and questioned the use of the word gender. The topic of reproductive rights was challenged directly in ways seeking to undermine advancements stemming from the October 1994 Cairo World Conference on Population and Development.
Gerry was appointed a vice-chair of the US delegation to Beijing in June 1995 and reached out immediately to NGOs and experts alike to work with her and tackle the issues one by one. She engaged in a wide range of informal contacts to try to improve the diplomatic atmosphere—and to reach agreements that affirmed rather than destroyed women’s universal rights. Ensuring a successful outcome in Beijing required her to engage with critics at home, as well as to interact with the representatives of the Vatican and Islamic states from Iran to Sudan. Conference language affirming universality of women’s human rights was threatened by other proposed language that would have both endorsed cultural relativity and emphasized national sovereignty, in particular, through repetition of a key footnote that had ‘saved’ the Cairo conference by encouraging each country to interpret the rights any way it wished. In the end, Gerry Ferraro succeeded in maintaining a US position that preserved the emphasis on universality of women’s rights for all, and concentrated on ensuring equal rights for women.
Hillary Clinton’s remarkable speech at the Conference fixed in delegates’ minds the concept that “women’s rights are human rights” and that they are not something different, inferior, or diminished as compared to other human rights.
The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action went on to affirm that violence against women was not merely an ‘obstacle’ to equality and peace as had been stated earlier in the 1980 Copenhagen World Conference on Women, but also an abuse that impaired and violated the enjoyment of human rights by women. It defined violence against women broadly – as a phenomenon occurring in public and in private – that had to be prevented, outlawed and punished. The document calls for reporting and monitoring of violations, investigations and prosecutions of perpetrators, due diligence by governments and accountability. The document identifies rape in armed conflict – the issue that spurred Ferraro to engage with the UN’s human rights bodies – as a war crime and under certain circumstances as a crime against humanity or act of genocide. The Beijing World Conference advanced women’s rights both conceptually and politically.
Gerry Ferraro, who was born on Women’s Equality Day (August 26), could claim a victory for the ideas, strategies, and ongoing efforts to bring women’s human rights issues into the mainstream of UN human rights bodies and world attention. Here, as in her unprecedented political candidacy, her efforts and achievements strengthened the position of all women.

(credit for September 12, 1995, UN/DPI 120801 photo by Chen Kai Xing of Ferraro, center, in Beijing)

On Being a Woman & a Diplomat

Further to our discussion of Madame la Secrétaire Générale... (here and here), a link to an irreverent talk by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on politics and diplomacy. She makes the case that women's issues deserve a place at the center of foreign policy.

Far from being a "soft" issue, she says, women's issues are often the very hardest ones, dealing directly with life and death.

Treaties no treat?

What to make of Jamie Rubin's blithe Farewell to the Age of the Treaty?
In an op-ed yesterday Rubin, a State Department spokesperson back when Madeleine Albright was Secretary of State, posited that treaties aren't "even worth the trouble anymore."
The "trouble," it appears, is not with international agreements themselves. Troublesome, rather, is securing 2/3 consent of the Senate, a constitutional sine qua non for U.S. ratification of a treaty. The requirement's now bedeviling President Barack Obama's bid for ratification, detailed here, of the U.S.-Russia New Start disarmament treaty. (prior posts) (credit for White House photo of April 2010 signing)
"'Fortunately, there is an alternative,'" Rubin breezed. He argued that statutes, which pass upon simple majorities of both houses of Congress, usually "will work just fine."
Even putting aside the glib assertion that "the international system has most of the rules it needs," Rubin's argument falters on a number of points:
► History: The op-ed's ahistorical in its implication that this is a new problem. Presidential struggles to clear the 2/3 Senate hurdle are "nothing new," as our Opinio Juris colleague Duncan Hollis pointed out. Failure to secure approval dates at least to President Woodrow Wilson, and the Senate's rejections of the Versailles Treaty (right) and the League of Nations Covenant, in 1919 and again in 1920 -- years surely within the putative "Age of Treaties." Rubin himself no doubt recalls President Bill Clinton's CTBT debacle back in 1999.
► Politics: Also implicit is an assumption that congressional majorities easily may be obtained. Rubin points to legislative efforts on climate change as an example of his position "already being used." He pretermits, however, that these efforts have yet to bear statutory fruit. Given that the New Year will inaugurate a House of Representatives with a heavy GOP lean, getting Congress to okay internationally aimed reforms would seem far from simple.
► International Relations: Rubin's solution seems unlikely to give U.S. status abroad the hefty boost he suggests. Statutes and treaties are quite different legal animals. A statute may be altered, even repealed, at any time. Preferring the legislative path thus adds instability to the United States' foreign relations. What's more, a statute is the unilateral enactment of a single sovereign. In contrast, a treaty embodies that sovereign's consent not just to act, but to do so out of an international obligation. Treaties represent a deeper level of commitment, a promise to pursue global cooperation even if domestic political winds shift. Opting always for the U.S. statutory fix, at a time when other countries are urged to join treaty regimes, seems unlikely to ease what Rubin rightly calls "international frustration with American leadership."
Hard to see the op-ed's effort -- in essence, to put a brave face on an inferior option -- as much more than advance spin should New Start founder in the Senate.

'Nuff said

(Taking context-optional note of thought-provoking quotes)

Diplomacy has long been the backbone of U.S. foreign policy. It remains so today. The vast majority of my work at the State Department consists of engaging in diplomacy to address major global and regional challenges, such as confronting Iran's nuclear ambitions, facilitating negotatiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, enhancing stability on the Korean Peninsula, and working with other governments to bring emergency relief to Haiti, And President Barack Obama and I certainly relied on old-fashioned diplomatic elbow grease to hammer out a last-minute accord at the Copenhagen conference on climate change last December.

-- U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in "Leading Through Civilian Power: Redefining American Diplomacy and Development." (credit for October 2010 photo) Clinton develops her wide-ranging exposition of the global work at State and myriad other agencies around the theme of her own initiative, "the first Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR), a wholesale review of the State Department and USAID." The article appears in the November/December 2010 Foreign Affairs, a "special issue" on the topic of "The World Ahead." Some of the other articles are of interest, but the lineup as a whole discomfits: if it weren't for Secretaries of State (Clinton and her predecessor, Madeleine Albright), there'd be virtually no women authors in the entire issue. We, too, think deeply about the world to come.

On February 14

On this day in...
... 2007, as duly noted by siblings we owe debts of gratitude – among them Legal History Blog, Opinio Juris, Concurring Opinions, and Anupam Chander – IntLawGrrls began a very short online pregnancy.
We'd announced that we were expecting a few days earlier, via this Heartfelt Hello:

Our world is a jumble of peoples, a mix of culture and custom, a marketplace of markets as well as ideas. We come together in amazing ways, yet clash in ways that bring destruction and dismay. Women now have a hand in our world’s affairs: think Albright and Arbour, del Ponte and Higgins, Ginsburg and Rice. Yet our voices remain faint, in backrooms and in the blogosphere. IntLawGrrls – women who teach and work in international law, policy and practice – hope to change all that. We embrace foremothers' names to encourage crisp commentary, delivered at times with a dash of sass. We welcome replies, and we look forward to fresh dialogue on the matters of the day.
It's our world, after all.

In gestation beginning February 14, 2007
Due date March 3, 2007 – Grrls’ Day in Japan

Our "on this day" feature thus enters its 3d year this Valentine's Day; accordingly, from now on we'll note the prior years' posts at the day's end. Those for February 14 are here and here.

On December 5

On this day in ...

... 1996 (a dozen years ago), President Bill Clinton announced he would nominate Madeleine Albright, to be U.S. Secretary of State in his 2d term. Then 59 years old and serving as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, she would be sworn in exactly 7 weeks later. Albright, about whom we've posted here, thus became the 64th person and the 1st woman to hold the United States' top diplomatic post. This week President-Elect Barack Obama tapped his primary-season rival, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), to be his Secretary of State. When sworn in she'll be the 3d woman to hold the job, succeeding current Secretary Condoleezza Rice. Clinton is, of course, the wife of the President who'd chosen Albright. (credit for 1998 photo of Secretary Albright and President Clinton)

... 2008 (today), is marked the 22d annual International Volunteer Day for Economic and Social Development, proclaimed by the U.N. General Assembly by this 1985 resolution in an effort to encourage pro bono service, by people in all walks of life, throughout the world.

A gender-balanced natsec sextet

A photo montage is worth a whole lot of words: For the 1st time in history, the President's national security leadership is about to comprise an equal number of women and men. (photo credit)

Yesterday President-Elect Barack Obama announced that he'd seek the Senate's confirmation of the 6 persons above as his key advisors on issues of national and global importance.

Most media attention has been paid to Obama's appointment of his chief rival for the Democratic nomination, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) (top row, middle) to be Secretary of State. It's an audacious, inspired choice. On account of both her years in the Senate and her years as 1st Lady, Clinton's been to and met with many of the leaders who're soon to be the object of her diplomatic endeavors. At home, it must be noted, Clinton's immediate (Condoleezza Rice) and recent (Madeleine Albright) predecessors are women. The same may be said of counterparts abroad: today women serve as the Foreign Minister in 24 countries besides the United States.

Among those slated to join Clinton in the Cabinet is Gov. Janet Napolitano (D-Ariz.) (bottom row, left), tapped to be the new Secretary of Homeland Security. As we've posted, she's also served as U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona and as Arizona's Attorney General. She'll inherit the daunting task of bringing to maturation a department birthed post-9/11 as an amalgamation of agencies in charge of counterterrorism, disaster relief, and border control, among many other bailiwicks.

Dr. Susan E. Rice (bottom row, right) is set to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, thus heading the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York. Rice will be the 3d American woman to hold the post; the others were Madeleine Albright and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick. And she'll follow a legion of women who've been their country's chief U.N. representative. During the tenure of U.S. President Bill Clinton, Rice served both in the State Department, as U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, and at the White House, as the National Security

Council's Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs and as Director for International Organizations and Peacekeeping. As we've posted, she was a key foreign policy advisor to Obama during his campaign. A onetime Rhodes Scholar who earned her Ph.D. in international relations from Oxford University, Rice has also been a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy and Global Economy and Development Programs at the Brookings Institution.

Rounding out the natsec team: Eric Holder (top row, left), nominated to be Attorney General; retired U.S. Marine Corps General Jim Jones (top row, right), to be National Security Advisor; and Dr. Robert Gates (bottom row, center), the subject of another IntLawGrrls post today, slated to remain as Secretary of Defense.

Women's words at the DNC

Some of the most moving words heard this week at the Democratic National Convention were uttered by women. Here's a sampling (videos available here):
From Sen. Hillary Clinton (left), the 1st woman to compete in every presidential primary, whose name was put in nomination, and for whom votes were cast before she herself moved that Sen. Barack Obama be nominated for President by acclamation:

I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible? ... This won’t be easy. Progress never is. But it will be impossible if we don’t fight to put a Democrat in the White House.

(Full text here.)

From Madeleine Albright (right), the 1st woman Secretary of State:

In high school, I won the Rocky Mountain Empire Award for reciting, in alphabetical order, the 51 members of the United Nations. Back then, the task was not so hard, but the world now is more fragmented, with more countries, multiple centers of power and many sources of danger.

(Full text here.)

From Claudia Kennedy (left), the Army's 1st and only 3-star general, now retired:

[T]orture is not only morally repugnant, it’s militarily ineffective. It doesn’t work. It puts our troops at risk. It endangers our national security.

(Full text here.)

From Maya Soetoro-Ng (right), schoolteacher and sister of Obama, on their mother, named at birth Stanley Ann Dunham:

Above all, she was a storyteller. She told us tales from history about heroism in the face of injustice, about beauty breaking through darkness. These stories suggested that our deepest humanity and happiness would be found by reaching out to, empathizing with and working to serve others. In these interconnected times, we need such stories.

(Full text here.)

And finally, from the superb speech by Michelle Obama (below left) on which IntLawGrrls posted a few days ago, a story about her husband that embodies -- to use Soetoro-Ng's words -- "our deepest humanity and happiness":

He’s the same man who drove me and our new baby daughter home from the hospital 10 years ago this summer, inching along at a snail’s pace, peering anxiously at us in the rearview mirror, feeling the whole weight of her future in his hands, determined to give her everything he’d struggled so hard for himself, determined to give her what he never had: the affirming embrace of a father’s love.

On January 23, ...

... 1997, Madeleine Albright was sworn in as the United States' 64th Secretary of State, the 1st woman ever to hold that position. Albright, who'd been born Marie Jana Korbelová in 1937 in Prague, Czechoslovakia, previously had served as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, as a member of President Bill Clinton's Cabinet, and as a member of the United States' National Security Council.
... 1912, the International Opium Convention was signed at The Hague, Netherlands. Aimed at illicit narcotics derived from poppies -- as shown in the 1859 Harper's Weekly editorial cartoon at right, opiates that were in "widespread use" in the 19th century -- this was the 1st multilateral drug control pact.

On July 27, ...

... 1929, delegates concluded a 7-month diplomatic conference in Geneva, Switzerland, by adopting the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field, a revision of 1864 and 1906 treaties on the same subject, and the Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, which operated to "complet[e]" the effort begun in the Hague Regulations of 1899 and 1907. Neither of the 1929 conventions is any longer in force, given the universal acceptance of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.
... 1789, President George Washington signed into law an act establishing a U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs, with

a principal Officer therein, to be called the Secretary for the department of foreign Affairs, who shall perform and execute such duties as shall from time to time be enjoined on, or intrusted to him by the President of the United States, agreeable to the Constitution, relative to correspondences, commissions, or instructions to, or with public Ministers or Consuls from the United States, or to negociations with public Ministers from foreign States or princes ....

Of the last 3 Secretaries of executive agency now known as the U.S. Department of State, 2, Madeleine Albright (left) and Condoleezza Rice (right), are women.

On May 15, ...

...1937 (70 years ago today), Madeleine K. Albright (left), the United States' 1st woman Secretary of State (1991-97), was born in Prague, in what was then Czechoslovakia.
...1869, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association, an organization dedicated to securing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would extend the franchise to women.
...1252 (755 years ago today), Ad exstirpanda, a bull issued by Pope Innocent IV, authorized the use of torture to extract confessions from presumed heretics. Succeeding popes reaffirmed the proclamation, and torture became widespread in Catholic Europe.

Electing democracy

"Africa's Crisis Of Democracy," headlined award-winning New York Timeswoman Lydia Polgreen's lament of this weekend's presidential election in Nigeria. Put to one side for a moment Amelia Earhart's important and nuanced thoughts about elections, abroad and in the United States. Put to the side too concerns of international observers -- among them former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- respecting fraud and violence in the process that returned Nigeria's ruling faction to power. Polgreen's news analysis itself sparks concern.
In declaring Africa in "crisis," the analysis effectively equated "democracy" with elections. That is a common, and mistaken, equation. A free and fair election indeed is a marker of government by the people. But it is by no means the only one; moreover, as experience close to home has shown, election irregularities do not always mark democracy's absence.
Longterm aims of nation-building ought to be "peace and stability" and "protecting human rights," Susan S. Gibson wrote in The Misplaced Reliance on Free and Fair Elections in Nation Building: The Role of Constitutional Democracy and the Rule of Law, 21 Houston J. Int'l L. 1 (1998). Gibson, then a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, continued: "[F]ree and fair elections, by themselves, have not and can not achieve those goals." Her article called on the United Nations not only to press for such elections, but also to "develop procedures to help countries form and nurture stable, democratic forms of government ... founded on the rule of law." This complex evaluation, by which elections are a factor rather than a determinant, is necessary before a "crisis" may be declared -- let alone addressed.

Pink ≠ fluffy

In cyberland last week, musings on the role of women in international law:

Our own Lakshmi Bai [IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales] saw "many shades of pink" in the fact that women (including her and 2 other IntLawGrrls) outnumbered men as presenters at an academic conference. Yet the note of optimism in her question, "Is the Future of International Law Rosy?", soured when commenters noted that "in Europe at least," women seemed relegated to human rights, a field deemed "fluffy," while men dominated trade and humanitarian law.

Meanwhile, a query at National Security Advisors blog, on why a U.S. academic panel on the Military Commissions Act included no woman among its 6 members, drew remarks in like vein. "[W]hat exactly is 'women's national security law'?" a commenter asked, adding that having Condoleezza Rice as Secretary of State trumps any panel imbalance.

A few comments: 1st, to work in human rights means to interview the victims and to defend the perpetrators of the world's worst crimes, to assess the credibility of horrific testimony, to campaign for conventions or to write articles that labor to balance outrage at atrocity against instilled values respecting the rights of the accused. None of that is "fluffy," and to call it such demeans the women and men (there are many of both) who devote themselves to that work. If indeed this is an emerging stereotype, it ought to be fought at every turn.

2d, the list of women who work in national security law neither begins nor ends with Secretary Rice. She was preceded, of course, by Madeleine Albright, who remains active in international matters. Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was among the members of the Iraq Study Group. Women, some of whom served in uniform, serve on boards of the National Institute of Military Justice. Several women help run the National Security Law Section of the very group that sponsored the questioned panel, and far more women teach and write on military justice and national security -- as is the case, at least in the United States, with fields like trade. (Included are many of us IntLawGrrls.)

Each of these many women no doubt approaches her work from her own vantage point. But most, I suspect, will describe what they do not as "women's" law, but rather, simply, as international law. Perhaps one day that description will draw no comment at all.

(Kudos to our colleague Steve Vladeck for raising the women-in-national-security question.)