A lot of big things happened over the holiday break. Here are some of them:
1) The Kingdom of Buganda rejected a land law passed by the Ugandan parliament. The law gives tenants more rights to resist potential evictions by landlords. Read about it here.
2) The governments of Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia are blocking Rwandan attempts to try suspects connected to the 1994 genocide. Read about it here.
3) The Iraq War: Legal but Illegitimate? So says Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN from 1997 to 2003. According to Greenstock:
If you do something internationally that the majority of UN member states think is wrong, illegitimate or politically unjustifiable, you are taking a risk in my view… I regarded our participation in the military action against Iraq in March 2003 as legal but of questionable legitimacy in that it did not have the democratically observable backing of a great majority of member states or even perhaps of a majority of people inside the UK.
There was a failure to establish legitimacy although I think we successfully established legality in the UN….to the degree, at least, that we were never challenged in the UN or International Court of Justice for those actions.
Sort of the mirror image of the UN International Commission on Kosovo’s conclusion about NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.
4) The Nation reports that Blackwater employees are involved in assassination attempts, intelligence gathering, and drone attacks in Pakistan. This comes from an unidentified source who, according to the article, “has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan” and “has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement.” Denials and “no comments” followed:
The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] in Pakistan. “We don’t have any contracts to do that work for us. We don’t contract that kind of work out, period,” the official said. “There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services…”
Blackwater, which recently changed its name to Xe Services and US Training Center, denies the company is operating in Pakistan. “Xe Services has only one employee in Pakistan performing construction oversight for the U.S. Government,” Blackwater spokesperson Mark Corallo said in a statement to The Nation, adding that the company has “no other operations of any kind in Pakistan.”
According to the article one unnamed “former senior executive at Blackwater” confirmed the original source’s story.
5) Kenneth Anderson of Opinio Juris asks: “Where is the United States on the Ottowa Landmines Ban Convention? Read his post here.
6) The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued their report: “How We Failed to Get Bin Laden and Why it Matters Today”. Read all about the U.S.’s failure to capture Bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001 here.
7) The IAEA passed a resolution condemning Iran. The text can be found here. The resolution reiterates past demands of the IAEA Board of Governors and the UN Security Council, urging Iran to halt uranium enrichment and to implement the IAEA’s Additional Protocol. However, the resolution also contains some noteworthy sections about Qom. In the resolution, the Board of Governors:
Also not[es] with serious concern that Iran has constructed an enrichment facility at Qom
in breach of its obligation to suspend all enrichment related activities and that Iran’s failure to
notify the Agency of the new facility until September 2009 is inconsistent with its obligations
under the Subsidiary Arrangements to its Safeguards Agreement…
And:
Urges Iran to comply fully and without delay with its obligations under the above mentioned
resolutions of the Security Council, and to meet the requirements of the Board of Governors, including
by suspending immediately construction at Qom…
Iran’s response? The Iranian government approved plans for 10 new enrichment sites. Also, Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Karamirad raised the possibility of Iranian withdrawal from the NPT.
