Dispatches from a bar in The Hague, The Netherlands, international city of peace, justice, and other warm-fuzzies we love

I can’t say my summer job lends itself as easy to parody as Nicola’s (an excellent post). I have spent the past month and a half now (on USP money, thanks, Tori) doing sundry research and consulting on justice sector development and international criminal liability (the sexy stuff). The gruntwork of international justice, the database I’ve been creating on justice sector development projects in post-conflict countries, I’ll leave aside, though if anyone’s keen on that, email me. I’ve been working on a consulting project for a senior ICC trial lawyer who at one point headed up the Darfur investigations, mostly conducting research on criminal liability for corporations. Apparently this is A Big Issue in research on and jurisprudence of contemporary international criminal liability. And it actually has Real World Repercussions…exciting, I know. This post starts off discussing recent developments in the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor (currently in The Hague) and how they relate to the research I’ve been doing on corporate criminal liability for my job. In a crisis of soap-opera proportions, replete with bruised egos, righteous indignation, and several wll-timed smack-downs, Taylor will finally be tried for war crimes occurring in Sierra Leone during under his leadership of a Liberian rebel group and its collusion with the Sierra Leonean Revolutionary United Front. He initially failed to appear for his own trial, fired his defense, decided he would defend himself, and ended up saying that, no, in fact, he’d rather have the best defense team that money can buy. (Which, apparently, will include the former ICC trial lawyer for whom I was doing research. To put it flippantly, it’s a small world. Bizarre).  Also bizarre is the finding that Charles Taylor is indigent, meaning that he is not financially able to pay for his own defense. Say what now? What about all of the gains he made through the money skimmed from contracts with the Oriental Timber Company and diamond dealing? The overseas bank accounts? This is where the corporate criminal liability issue comes into play. To what extent can a corporation (such as, Shell Oil, Chiquita, Anvil Mining) be held liable for involvement in war crimes? Who is “at fault”? Is it the directors? The workers? This thing called the “corporation”? Which national legal systems get first dibs on trials? What happens in the event of a conviction? What about the premise of individual guilt? Is criminal and/or civil prosecution a viable tool in the push to end a culture of corporate impunity? Chiquita (motto: “Perfect for Life”), for example, has claimed in a civil suit that it only had the best interests of its fruit pickers in mind when it hired “security forces” who also happen to be paramilitaries who have murdered and otherwise intimidated Colombians in the area of Chiquita operations.  These are not ‘obvious cases’ like the Zyklon B Case, in which Bruno Tesch, was convicted of war crimes in providing the Nazi regime with the gas used to kill (Tesch claimed he didn’t know it was going to be used to gas inmates…but rather he cited the innocuous and “well-known use” of Zyklon B as a pesticide against lice! That defense was shut down, however, due to evidence that he had ordered tests of the gas on Russian POWs. Geez, officer, I had no idea…). That’s what makes the concept so tricky—in a world in which multinational corporations necessarily bridge many different national justice systems and operate through bureaucracies of middle men, at what point is it logical and appropriate to assign blame to a corporate entity for breaches of international humanitarian law? Corporate criminal liability as a theoretical concept is a moving target, and since the Nuremberg Trials, it has played out in contradictory and fragmented ways. I had been asked to research its parameters for a pilot training and consulting program being developed by several international lawyers. And after writing a thesis length report that tries to define the concept and whether or not it can be used to persuade businesses to comply with international humanitarian law, I feel like I’m aiming darts at stampeding buffalo.  

–Claire L.

Thoughts about empire

In the introduction to Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, author Laura Briggs goes on something of a tangent about the constitutional status of Puerto Rico vis-a-vis the United States. Mainland liberals, she writes, are often confused about why Puerto Ricans seem satisfied with free association, the colonial status they have currently. Liberals, she writes, imagine that Puerto Ricans should prefer either independence or statehood, and probably independence. Yet in multiple referendums (the freeness of which are highly debatable), voters have chosen the status quo. She posits that this is because Puerto Ricans understand the breadth of American Empire far more than Mainland citizens can. They understand, she says, that all people in the Western Hemisphere–indeed, around the world–are to some extent a part of the American Empire. As long as they are, Briggs’s Puerto Ricans figure, better to get the advantages of Free Association–citizenship, tax breaks favoring industrial development–than not. In other words, better to be colonized Puerto Rico, collecting on the obligations the Mainland U.S. takes on, than to be theoretically independent Mexico, still under American control but without any formal obligation.

Today on the blog I want to interrogate this idea using Canada as an example of a still different relationship with the United States. Two things got me thinking about this: the Conrad Black trial I mentioned in my earlier post, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s continuing trip to South America and the Caribbean. I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts on this from their own studies, experiences, and travels. Please comment on this entry or write your own!

More on Polaris

(Updated to include more articles and context.)

By the way, lest you think that only blog commenters are interested in the region of the Polaris nominees, look at the coverage in the National Post and the The Toronto Star, both based in Toronto, and both of which highlight the Montreal-centered list. Meanwhile, the StarPhoenix in Saskatoon simultaneously highlights the regionalism while trying to discount it.

That said, as this commentary from the CBC and this one from Toronto’s EyeWeekly shows, there are other criticisms too, starting with the uniformity of genre. And that’s true. Basically, this year is all indie rockers (although Julie Doiron is pretty folky), which comes in stark contrast to last year’s list, which included some hip-hop (K’naan and Cadence Weapon), some folk (Sarah Harmer), some mildly electronica-ish rock (Metric), and the challenging, arty, and terrific Final Fantasy (the final winner). (Last year’s list was also more geographically balanced and included Francophone act Malajube, which is often heralded as the first Francophone band to break out into Anglophone Canada.)

It’s probably worth pointing out that given the way Polaris works (a larger jury of music critics submit a list of five choices each, and then the top ten vote-getters are shortlisted) some of these complaints are merely sour grapes. The band I included in my top five didn’t get selected. This is probably made more so by the fact that the jury discusses while they’re making their top-five lists.

Greetings from the Explosion City

After a splendid, two-week vacation in China and some time recuperating from having a wisdom tooth extracted, I’m now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I spend my says (six of them a week), in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. I’m going through a sample of around 14,000 files about families that applied for aid after an enormous explosion in 1917. The explosion, which killed around 2000 people, was the largest human-caused explosion until Hiroshima (although that’s a rather silly thing to say, since “largest explosion” doesn’t actually have very much meaning).

A friend of mine–at the time, I was living in France and he in England–once described a theory of expat experience to me. He suggested that when Americans go to country that speaks a foreign language, they expect things to be different, and so their time there is spent becoming more and more aware of how much the same things are. In contrast, when Americans go abroad to Anglophone countries, they expect things to be roughly the same, and so they spend their time there discovering how different things are in each country. I’m not actually sure he’s right, but in any case, one of the things frequent or long-term American visitors to Canada have to think about is how and whether Canada is particularly different from the US. (Those of us who study Canada, of course, could be said to study this as our jobs.) Here are three pieces of news that Canadians are talking about that help describe the difference, or not, between the Canada and “the Republic to the South.”

Travels with Charlie

I recently returned to the city of my birth, Boston, Massachusetts.

In Boston, purchase of one CharlieCard allows one to reuse and recharge fares for using the MBTA, whose rail system is more commonly known at “the T.”

The card’s name harkens to a song called “The M.T.A. Song“, more commonly known as “Charlie on the M.T.A.”  The protagonist of the story, a man named Charlie, was unable to get off the train because he did not have enough money to pay the exit fare that was then part of the complicated M.T.A. fare system.  The song was based on the 1865 folk song, “The Ship that Never Returned,” and was part of Progressive Party candidate Walter O’Brien’s run for mayor of Boston in 1948.  As part of his platform, O’Brien sought reform of the M.T.A. fare system.  In 1959, the American folk group The Kingston Trio had a hit with the resurrection of the song.

My family frequently sung this song on road trips, especially after we moved to New Jersey and would return to visit my relatives in Boston. I always felt so sorry for poor Charlie, stuck underground forever. I felt like my existence almost paralleled his, stuck seemingly forever in the car on the long ride north. 

-Tori L.