mardi 8 avril 2003

The war and the law After saying two weeks ago that I'd been unable to find detailed legal justification for the military action against Iraq on the Net, but plenty of arguments against it, I offered a week's supply of free refreshment (well, coffee) to anybody else on the Desk at work who could. Maybe the bribe wasn't big enough, but nobody turned anything up. So I've come across a new legal perspective with interest: "UN resolutions for military intervention in Korea in 1950 and Iraq in 1990 show, by their novelty, that nearly all wars since the Second World War have been waged without UN authorisation. Prosecutions for war crimes have been equally scarce. After concluding their affairs in Nuremberg (1946) and Tokyo (1948), there were no war crimes tribunals until the UN created two to deal with conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (1993) and Rwanda (1994). The formation of these two ad hoc war crimes tribunals in the mid-1990s was a significant step in bringing international law into the arena of war. Before then, international law was a discipline studied by international lawyers that rarely impacted on nation states deciding whether, when or how to wage war." At 'spiked' (among "places I go"), barrister and writer Jon Holbrook makes a tightly argued case -- discussing "custom law", "treaty law" and the UN Charter -- to suggest that in "the debates about international law and Iraq, the very basis of international law is being undermined". And he comes to a thought-provoking conclusion. 8:44:53 PM  link   your views? [] Chasing the next big cat Since Apple announced the programme for this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, speculation has mounted as to what Panther will bring: the Mac's own music download service, and that after iWorks instead of AppleWorks 7? Xicons is already offering a Panther set: pink! Hmm... In French, VNUNet speculates in detail on an OS 9-type finder. In English, slashdot takes another angle. For the end-user, eWeek predicts the release for September. And the discussion at GEEK.com is under way. Were I sufficiently geek-headed, I could think of far worse ways to begin a trip to the United States than San Francisco in June, but I'm also informed that many of these people get up far, far too early for my system, if ever they go to bed! 11:27:32 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.