2009 HSRC Conference Professor Virginia Tilley:South African Foreign Policy 10:30-12:00 Thursday17 September 2009Birchwood Confr.Centre Boksburg

by Kevin Jon Heller

(source:Opinio Juris-Blog Archive)

Although often critical of Israel, I have always been sympathetic to Israeli claims that the UN Human Rights Council has deliberately appointed individuals to investigate conditions in the Palestinian territories who were either actually biased against Israel or who at least could not avoid the appearance of bias.  I was completely opposed, for example, to the HRC’s decision to appoint Richard Falk a Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”

The Goldstone Commission, however, is a different kettle of fish entirely.  Justice Goldstone is, to put it mildly, one of the most eminent international lawyers in the world — a judge for nine years on the Constitutional Court of South Africa; the first Chief Prosecutor of the ad hoc Tribunals; a member of the international panel appointed by Argentina to investigate Nazi activity in the country since 1938; the chairperson of the international inquiry into Kosovo; and so on.  He is also Jewish and a trustee of Hebrew University in Israel.  So it is difficult to plausibly maintain that he is biased against Israel — particularly given that one of his first acts after being appointed by the HRC to investigate Operation Cast Lead was to publicly announce that he would not abide by HRC Res. S-9/1’s indefensible request to limit the fact-finding mission to Israel’s war crimes, but would investigate Hamas’s war crimes, as well.

Read More »The inevitable attack on the goldstone commission

By Iain Marlow – Staff Reporter

(source: The Star.com)

Jameel Jaffer dug up torture memos

One of the key figures behind the cascade of documents detailing torture and abuse within America’s global "war on terror" happens to be a Canadian-born graduate of Toronto’s Upper Canada College.

Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer born in London, Ont., was instrumental in filing and fighting an unlikely Freedom of Information Act request that eventually unearthed thousands of pages of secret documents which illustrated damning evidence of U.S. government complicity in violations of international humanitarian law.
"A lot of the documents describe abuses that are really horrific," he said in an interview. "It was hard to believe that these incidents had occurred in facilities run by the United States."

Jaffer told the Star last night that this type of lengthy and expensive legal muck-raking is unlikely to occur in Canada because grants and funding are so scarce. "There are people doing this kind of work in Canada and they have a tough job," he said."
The request was filed by Jaffer and fellow ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh – daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – in October 2003, before the disturbingly iconic Abu Ghraib prison photographs emerged. When those photos came out in April of 2004, they spurred Jaffer and Singh to press their request in court, which is sometimes the only way to successfully pursue an FOI request.

Six years later, more than 130,000 pages of previously classified evidence has trickled out; much of it has been seized upon by critics of America’s seemingly unending global war on terrorism.

Read More »How canadian lawyer unearthedUStorture documents