courting disaster

Cambridge snow: car scraping fun!

2009-12-18T09:31:00.006Z

Door

2009-08-24T19:37:00.002+01:00

G. David and Son bookstore, Cambridge.

St Edmund's passage on the weekend

2009-08-21T15:47:00.002+01:00

Published!

2009-08-17T09:38:00.001+01:00

Weekend in Norwich and the Broads

2009-08-10T22:00:00.004+01:00

The Red Lion, Norwich: possibly the most English of English riverside pubs we've seen.

Canoeing on the Broads outside Roxton.

Mid-canoeing lunch (before the food arrived).

Saffron Walden (again)

2009-07-24T17:14:00.001+01:00

A basement full of chairs at Reeds Antiques.

Vicar's car, Saffron Walden

2009-07-22T22:50:00.004+01:00

We took a day off on Monday and ran out to Saffron Walden again. A lovely day, but road closures on the A14 made getting back a bit of a trial as diverted traffic backed up onto the B roads ...

Kourion, Cyrpus

2009-07-14T21:18:00.003+01:00

Once again, the view over Episkopi Bay was one of the highlights of the holiday.

Amsterdam

2009-07-12T09:47:00.002+01:00

A surprisingly classy hotel room for the conference on Wednesday (my unmade bed notwithstanding). Shame there was no time to see the city.

Cyprus holiday

2009-07-06T09:32:00.002+01:00

View from Kourion's annexe of Eusolios looking over Episkopi bay.

Neighbourhood

2009-06-26T07:55:00.001+01:00

The sculptor's/jeweller's studio around the corner from us.

Spring flowers

2009-06-25T11:56:00.004+01:00

The profusion of flowers everywhere is one of the joys of Spring in Cambridge. That and daylight until 10 pm, which I can never quite get used to after the depths of winter ...

Our car

2009-06-24T21:04:00.003+01:00

I've not owned a car since leaving Melbourne in 2003. We bought this just a few weeks ago (click for a bigger image), I've only posted a picture of something so dull as a friend has requested it. Nonetheless, we love it: it has the biggest interior of a small car I've ever seen - the three back bucket seats can fold down in two separate ways or lift out entirely!

Bilbao

2009-06-23T16:14:00.004+01:00

A very pleasant weekend away ...

A great conference venue

2009-06-19T11:23:00.001+01:00

Onati, Spain (outside Bilbao).

Dinner last night

2009-06-17T11:08:00.002+01:00

Cycles vs Punts

2009-06-16T09:35:00.003+01:00

A photo from Saturday of a common summer sight: dragging punts over the rollers and cycle path at the Mill Pond lock to get from the Backs heading upstream to Grantchester.

Saffron Waldon

2009-06-15T10:30:00.004+01:00

The brick-paved turf maze at Saffron Waldon common yesterday, on a balmy afternoon ...

The Granta

2009-06-13T13:18:00.001+01:00

The punt station outside our local, the Granta.

Rug

2009-06-11T22:48:00.003+01:00

About two years ago we both started new jobs. We still had quite a few debts, but with a surprisingly large slice of our combined first pay packet we bought this rug.

It was a good investment.

Community

2009-06-10T09:15:00.004+01:00

One of the things I like about our neighbourhood is this impromptu noticeboard on the street outside our flat. It's a section of fence that's been in use this way as long as we've been here.

It provides some insight into a family neighbourhood in a university town: children's furniture, yoga, public lectures, home reading groups, private language tuition.

An action figure we can believe in!

2009-06-09T08:29:00.002+01:00

So, anytime one of goes away, the other has to get them a bad present from the airport. On my trip to DC in April I picked up a little presidential fun. He lives on top of our coffee-maker, along with the egg-shells ...

India has authority to pursue pirates

2008-11-23T14:42:00.004Z

"Delhi has formally been given permission to act under a UN resolution allowing navies to pursue pirates into Somalia's territorial waters."

UN Security Council Resolution 1816 is a very odd creature, authorising pursuit of pirates into Somalia's territorial waters - where Somalia (or at least the internationally recognised, if ineffectual, Transitional Federal Government) consents.

This is an authority the TFG could give under international law, with or without a UNSCR. Thus, Resolution 1816 is largely pointless. Nonetheless, this is the first formal report I've caught on an agreement stuck between the TFG and a foreign navy under the Resolution (which expires next month anyway).

India has already shown it's prepared to use lethal force against pirates. In that case it appears to have been self-defence or returning fire. This would clearly be legal, though a shoot-on-sight policy towards pirates would not.

Pirates may be nasty characters but generally they are little more than common criminals who - while hostage-takers - are not interested in endangering life unnecessarily. (What use is a dead hostage?) We are not at war with pirates, and most legal systems don't authorise shoot-to-kill policies in the course of general law enforcement. That said, such an approach might well not generate much protest.

I doubt, however, it would be much of a deterrent. So long as Somalia remains in chaos and easy pickings are available in the Gulf of Aden, piracy will continue regardless of the risks to the pirates themselves.

Obama on international law

2008-11-11T13:26:00.002Z

In response to an ASIL survey:

"The next president will have to prioritize restoring our traditions of adherence to international legal regimes and norms. When I am President, America will reject torture without exception. America is the country that stood against that kind of behavior, and we will do so again. I also will reject a legal framework that does not work. There has been only one conviction at Guantanamo. It was for a guilty plea on material support for terrorism. The sentence was 9 months. There has not been one conviction of a terrorist act. As president, I will close Guantanamo, reject the Military Commissions Act, and adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Our Constitution and laws such as our Uniform Code of Military Justice provide a framework for dealing with the terrorists."

How quickly could most of this be done after 20 January? Just about instantly, I'd hope.

Only in a Cambridge student paper ...

2008-11-07T15:52:00.001Z

Headline on the US election: "Yes we could", thus identifying the correct use of the conditional subjunctive.

Welcome to pirate-town, we hope you enjoy your stay ...

2008-10-17T09:57:00.004+01:00

So, I've posted previously on "polite pirating" off Somalia.

And I've followed with interest the story of the pirates who seized a ship carrying 33 Ukranian battle-tanks, has had a long stand-off with the US navy; meanwhile another hijacked vessel has been liberated by the army of Puntland.

I've known for some time from UN reports that in the Puntland area there are "pirate command centres" and even official pirate spokesmen.

But the surrealism of Somalia's increasingly pirate-based economy reaches dizzying heights with the Port of Eyl where restraunts have been established to feed hostages seized for ransom.

"Welcome to the maison des hostages, may we recommend the beef this evening? We hope you enjoy your meal."

This may even beat inviting your hostages to a BBQ.

Library blogs

2008-10-04T15:02:00.006+01:00

An increasing number of law libraries have blogs of their own. As an all round bibliophile and library geek, I'll try and update this post a bit over coming days, but to start with a few palatial libraries ...

The Peace Palace Library (International Court of Justice)

This is a remarkably useful website, as their catalogue is updated more often than the homepages of a number of leading journals. While not full-text searchable, if you want a comprehensive list of everything published on a topic/by a person in public international law, it's a one stop shop.

The library blog is on blogger and candid photos are found on flickr. Some of the photos are really good!

Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School

This really is one to bring out library-envy. I've only ever really studied in modern law libraries, even in Cambridge. The Lillian Goldman not only looks gorgeously kitted out, but it has its own facebook fansite, complete with photos. The blog itself is over here.

More suggestions welcome ...

Psst ... you chasin' some crusty local bread?

2008-09-16T12:48:00.003+01:00

The definition of an entrepreneur is (I would suggest) someone who sees a profitable market opportunity and is willing to take the associated risks.

Among the most efficient entrepreneurs are organised criminals: organised crime being the proof that if there's money to be made, making something illegal does little but increase the risks involved and therefore the profitability of an activity.

It appears, though, that in these times of rising food prices those original criminal geniuses, the crime families of Italy, have taken another basic business principle to heart: diversify.

The Guardian reports that:

"According to a report released last week, city officials and investigators suspect Camorra clans are behind many of the 1,400 unlicensed backstreet bakeries in and around the city which supply hundreds of street vendors who sell loaves out of car boots - and they may be spreading into selling other basic food products.

Open 24 hours a day, the street sellers are drawing shoppers with cheap, crusty bread fresh from wood-burning ovens, the way Neapolitans like it. But police say Naples' new breed of bakers are slowly poisoning their customers by burning old varnished wood, nut shells covered in pesticides and even planks pulled from exhumed coffins. 'Whoever buys this bread is eating dioxins and carcinogenic substances and putting their health at serious risk,' said Francesco Borrelli, assessor for agriculture for the province of Naples.

Borrelli's investigation into the underground bakeries prompted raids by Carabinieri police who found dough being mixed by illegal immigrant labour in filthy, humid and mould-streaked cellars, some perilously close to burning piles of toxic waste dumped in fields around Naples by the Camorra, which was linked earlier this year to suspected tainting of local mozzarella."

Contaminating traditional bread and mozzarella? Truly, these people they got no respect ...

Puffins and beer

2008-09-05T09:52:00.005+01:00

Where did August go?

Mostly, on finishing the typescript for my first academic book. Partly, on a two-week holiday taking in the Edinburgh Festival, Orkney and the Shetland Islands.

The northern islands are amazing, in a dramatic, remote and relatively flat way. We were too late for Puffin nesting season, sadly. There were, though, still lots of peat, sheep, Shetland ponies and ruins everywhere you turned (neolithic villages/viking long houses/castles/crofters' cottages/abandoned MOD radar installations).

One of the more amazing things in the Orkney islands is Skara Brae: the only relatively intact neolithic village in the world. It's an archeologist's dream, and it's fairly incredibly to look at still recognisable furniture (stone dresser, stone bed-box, stone pestle) that was used by real people 4,000 years ago. I doubt our flat-pack furniture will fare so well, even if covered by sand for a few millenia.

Nonetheless, as I stood at the world heritage site, a small Philistine's voice whispered in the back of my head: "With all the narrow sandy passages, little grassy knolls and wee stone walls ... It looks a bit like a putt-putt golf course, doesn't it?"

A guide to polite pirating

2008-08-08T10:57:00.005+01:00

Some may recall the dramatic episode in which Somalian pirates held hostage the crew of the luxury yacht Ponant and were then captured by French commandos after showing up to swap the hostages for the ransom.

With the approval of the Somalian Transitional Federal Government, the pirates were removed for trial in France.

There, as part of their defence, they have raised the fact that they were best-practice-following polite pirates. According to the Mirror:

The six raiders claimed they had a good conduct manual on how to seize foreign vessels to ensure their prisoners felt "relaxed and cheerful" during their week's captivity.

The written guide said they must not sexually assault women hostages, not shout at prisoners, give them food and drink regularly and let them sleep and use the toilet when they ask.

The gunmen even brought goats on to the 290ft French yacht, inviting their captives and 20 friends from their village in Somalia to an on-board barbecue.

After all, being rude could be bad for business.

However funny, this lack of violence is - in a way - good news. According to the IMO in 2007 attacks at sea or in port saw 20 mariners killed, over 153 injured and 194 kidnapped or taken hostage worldwide; 16 ships were hijacked, and one vessel and three crew remained unaccounted for as at April 2008.

Polite pirating certainly sounds better than being thrown overboard while pirates re-paint your cargo container carrier at sea to create a "phantom ship" they can steam into port to sell all the cargo ... (see paragraphs 179 and 180 of this UN report).

A little water

2008-07-29T10:41:00.003+01:00

Not on a scale, admittedly, with the horrendous UK floods of 2007 but this was the result of just 30 minutes rain on our street on Sunday. Nonetheless, the lessons of proper drainage maintenance don't quite seem to have gotten home to local government.

Of course, in that time 11 mm fell: so it was absolutely torrential. Coelacanth got caught out in and was utterly soaked.

A conversation by the river 15 minutes earlier went something like this:

Coelacanth: Hey, come meet some people!

Doug: No, I think I'll get home before it rains.

Coelacanth: OK, see you later then!

Optimism: 0; curmudgeon: 1.

More amusingly, I didn't quite get our lounge room window closed in time and the back of the TV got a bit wet. When we settled in to watch the ever-surreal Mighty Boosh that night the red-spectrum was missing from our screen, leaving everything an under-the-sea washed out green. As the TV slowly dried out under its own power, the colours faded back in.

Airport luggage: the case of the carry-on chainsaw

2008-07-27T22:38:00.002+01:00

From the New Zealand Herald (12 May 2008):

Never mind the nail scissors, what about the chainsaw?

A reader writes: "My brother-in-law went through security at Auckland domestic airport and witnessed a passenger having to fish out her nail scissors from her handbag and leave them behind. He went through security and then boarded his plane. After being seated he could smell petrol. He knew you shouldn't be able to smell petrol on a plane, because planes don't use petrol. The smell got worse and eventually he got the attention of one of the flight attendants. They started to look around to see where it was coming from. They found in the overhead compartment a chainsaw in a bag that was leaking petrol into the compartment. His plane was delayed as the owner was identified and the chainsaw removed and put with the main luggage. The owner of the chainsaw said security had stopped him but had let him through because it wasn't one of the things on their list to confiscate.

Most amusing sign-post yet

2008-07-21T08:26:00.005+01:00

So, I took some time off revising my PhD for its publication as a book (an experience that's a blog in itself), for a morale-restoring bike ride around some neighbouring villages recently.

I decided to take a short-cut between Coton and another hamlet by cycling down a "bridle path".

Bridle paths seem designated for horses, but judging by the single, grass-bare groove in the soil are frequently used by bikes.

Mountain bikes, probably, the serious type, rather than my enfeebled second-hand incredibly low-slung town bike. Nonetheless, like a good Australian I didn't allow totally inappropriate tools to prevent me tackling a job.

Anyway, while bouncing along the remains of a corrugated track made, it seemed, by giant tractor treads I came across this gem of a warning sign (click for larger image):

Because, y'know, its not as if horses hadn't been traversing this area for a while already ...

No peace without justice: but can justice precede peace?

2008-07-13T19:13:00.005+01:00

Two interesting articles on international criminal law came out of the New York Times stable this weekend.

Jean-René Ruez was an international war crimes investigator in the former Yugoslavia. An account of his experiences is published in the IHT. Ruez's motto is clearly, and understandably, "No peace without justice." But what happens when those goals come into conflict?

"The Pursuit of Justice vs. the Pursuit of Peace" reports on the plan of the ICC Prosecutor to seek an arrest warrant for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan’s president tomorrow.

The predictable responses have included fears that this will:

(1) jeopardise the safety of the joint UN/African Union peacekeepers - presently unable to defend even themselves properly - and other humanitarian workers in Darfur, already accused of being spies for the ICC;

(2) be an obstacle to any kind of peace settlement; and

(3) destabilise the region, as an already paranoid regime - armed by China - resorts to increasing violence.

The permanent International Criminal Court could well do more harm than good here. There is simply no realistic prospect of Omar Hassan al-Bashir being arrested in the short term. As I've outlined below, on the topic of Zimbabwe, criminal regimes simply cannot be prosecuted before there is stability in their country and a transition of power,which will likely require their cooperation.

The ICC prosecutor is an independent officer, who has a job to do - and he is doing it. The problem here is not him fulfilling his duty, it's that the Security Council approved referring Darfur to the Court as a substitute for taking any more effective action in the first place.

Perhaps in the long run, this will bring pressure to bear on the Sudan that will produce constructive results; but in the short term, it carries incredible risks for those on the ground in Darfur.

PS: for the more optimistic among us, Richard Goldstone has published possibly the best set of counter-arguments to my position. (Although the argument that "the indictments may delegitimize the government in the eyes of the Sudanese people, especially the elites in Khartoum" seems especially optimistic.)

Mugabe and crimes against humanity

2008-07-05T15:32:00.005+01:00

Any number of bloggers and mainstream journals have begun to accuse Robert Mugabe of crimes against humanity. The Economist has one of the more sensible pieces.

Could Mugabe be charged with international crimes? Simply put, crimes against humanity are acts such as murder, torture, rape and politically-motivated severe human rights violations “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” (see Article 7, Statute of the International Criminal Court). In addition, such an attack must be committed, at least under ICC law, “pursuant to or in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack” (see the ICC Elements of Crimes).

A widespread and systematic attack against opposition supporters, planned and orchestrated by Zanu-PF and the government of Zimbabwe certainly appears to have proceeded the second-round presidential elections.

There are two principal obstacles to an ICC indictment for Mugabe. The first is that, as Zimbabwe is not a party to the Court’s Statute, the Security Council would have to refer the situation to Zimbabwe. Given Russia and China’s stance on intervention in another State’s “internal affairs”, that seems unlikely.

The second obstacle, and I say this with some trepidation, is common sense. Counter-intuitive as this may sound, any effort – even a successful one – to remove Mugabe is likely to be an obstacle to a peaceful transition in Zimbabwe.

Mugabe is not necessarily the largest part of the problem. As Allan Little of the BBC puts it:

Robert Mugabe is now cocooned with a group of men who came through the liberation struggle with him. ...
When the opposition talk of allowing Mr Mugabe to retire with dignity, these men know that this magnanimity does not extend to them; that a post-Mugabe Zimbabwe will expect a holding to account.
Mugabe, in a sense, is their prisoner. They won't let him go quietly, leaving them exposed to revenge.
Fear is the means by which they stay in power - the people's fear of them. But they too live in fear, fear of the reckoning that the people will, themselves, one day, demand.

A transition to a peaceful and stable Zimbabwe will, in the short term, require that all these men be bought off – odious a prospect as that may be.

So what role international criminal law? Is Geoffrey Robertson right to claim that justice is a necessary precondition to peace? In my view, yes and no. There will be no lasting peace without justice, but attempting to make it a precondition in every case risks destabilising post-dictatorship transitional societies.

The best option, in many ways, is the Argentine solution: allow the outgoing government to cover themselves in amnesty laws as the price of securing a stable democracy; then allow campaigners, national parliaments and courts, and international attempts at prosecution to progressively repeal those amnesties and put the criminals on trial.

Some might ask, but what would you have the West do? I actually think the very painful answer may be: if there is no reasonable prospect that anything you could do would make things any better, the right thing is to do nothing at all. Indictment of Mugabe, the laughable prospect of sanctions (how do you impose sanctions on a ruined economy?), or outright military intervention will only drive this cabal and their supporters to further violence. Indeed, any such action just makes Mugabe’s cabal and their ridiculous western-conspiracy rhetoric look more credible.

There will come a time to indict these men, but it may have to follow – not precede – a new internal constitutional settlement in Zimbabwe. In that process, only the voices of neighbours are likely to have any influence at all.

Dog poo, school districts and terrorism

2008-06-29T14:03:00.003+01:00

Despite equivocal evidence as to their effectiveness, the UK has more CCTV cameras than any other country in Europe. A fairly high tolerance of surveillance has thus become part of British life.

Against this backdrop comes a bizarre, but not entirely unexpected example of the normalisation and extension of counter-terrorism laws: a law initially justified as a terror prevention measure is now being used by local councils to spy on residents for matters falling a long way short of serious organised crime.

The UK government said that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 was intended to provide:

"a statutory basis for the authorisation and use by the security and intelligence agencies, law enforcement and other public authorities of covert surveillance, agents, informants and undercover officers. It will regulate the use of these techniques and safeguard the public from unnecessary invasions of their privacy."

To this end surveillance was only to be authorised when "necessary", meaning on grounds that it was needed:

in the interests of national security;
for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime or preventing disorder;
in the interests of the economic well-being of the UK;
in the interests of public safety;
for the purpose of protecting public health;
for the purpose of assessing or collecting any tax, duty, levy or other imposition,
contribution or charge payable to a government department; or
for other purposes which may be specified by order of the Secretary of State.

The trick is that these powers extended to local authorities, some of whom have had a very interesting idea of what constitutes "crime" or "disorder".

We have so far seen examples where:

"a family in Poole in Dorset were tracked covertly for nearly three weeks to check they lived in a school catchment area"

(which, in fact, they did) and one council has admitted

that its officers were in the middle of an undercover operation using digital cameras and binoculars to catch those failing to scoop up their dogs' poo.

What is most worrying to my mind, though, is not the use of powers introduced to fight serious crime being delegated to local councils so they can snoop on poorly-behaved neighbours. Nor is it the blatant waste of resources. It's that this is proving popular in some quarters.

If those who will trade liberty for a little brief security deserve neither and will lose both, what is the fate of those who will trade liberty for slightly cleaner pavements?

Update: ICC Lubanga Trial

2008-06-29T13:31:00.006+01:00

Mr Lubanga did not walk free on Tuesday. The International Criminal Court found his release would be premature while the Prosecutor goes on to appeal the ruling requiring disclosure of information initially gathered on terms of confidentiality.

As noted below, much of that information was provided by the UN and it is the UN which must waive confidentiality.

The Prosecutor has said of his appeal:

“The Foundations of the ICC have to be based on high standards and efficiency ... We will harmonise fair trials with respect for the institutions that provide information to us. The basic framework to solve this particular problem is settled with the UN and we will explain this clearly to the judges”.

I am ambivalent about this. If "the basic framework to solve this particular problem is settled" means that the UN will now allow the defence and the Court to see this material in a full and proper way, then that's fine.

If, however, the words "the basic framework ... is settled" and the worrying references to "efficiency" and "respect for the institutions that provide information" all add up to an assertion that existing practices are fine and all that judges require is a clearer explanation on appeal, then we have a real problem.

The right to a fair trial cannot and should not be balanced against "efficiency" of the value of the ICC's working relationship with the UN. If the ICC cannot proceed with a trial fairly (a different thing from "perfectly"), it should simply not proceed at all.

Whatever the outcome of the Lubanga appeal, it looks set to have consequences for the new ICC cases opening against Congolese militia leaders Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui.

The quiet, procedural death of the International Criminal Court?

2008-06-23T14:17:00.006+01:00

Tomorrow, the first man expected to stand trial before the ICC – Thomas Lubanga - may simply walk away to board the first plane out of the Hague, following three years in prison and without his trial having ever officially commenced.

This staggering outcome follows from a practice of the Prosecutor’s office that the Trial Chamber described in a decision on 13 June as a “wholesale and serious abuse”. Without accusing the Prosecutor’s office of bad faith, it seems clear that a procedural device for collecting evidence under conditions of anonymity in exceptional and limited circumstances became the Prosecutor’s tool of first resort. As a result, the possibility of running a fair trial was fatally compromised.

Basically, in order to gather evidence, the Prosecutor’s office promised suppliers of information that the evidence they turned over would be kept confidential – even from ICC judges. The intention seems to have been that if any information was identified as needed to run the trial, the prosecution would go back to the suppliers and negotiate for waiver of confidentiality.

The flaws in this approach were:

this is not what Article 54 of ICC Statute, on a plain reading, allows the prosecutor to do (they are limited to using confidentiality only to gather leads which might point to evidence for use in the trial);
it meant the prosecution was not in control of the evidence, the witnesses were (and for “the witnesses” read “the United Nations”); and
it left the prosecution wide open to a defence allegation that they were withholding potentially exculpatory evidence that they were obliged to disclose, thus preventing a fair trial.

Inevitably, the defence did make that argument and it had some justification. The Prosecution claimed, as a result of confidentiality agreements concluded largely with the UN, that it was beyond its power to put some 207 potentially relevant documents into evidence. Of these 153 were UN documents.

The prosecution’s argument boiled down to “well, in fact, nothing we’re withholding would materially aid the defence or alternative evidence is available, so it doesn’t matter.” The Trial Chamber, quite properly, asserted that it was for the Court, not the Prosecutor, to weigh the evidence and the defendant was entitled to all potentially relevant prosecution material, not a selection of it.

I have more sympathy for the prosecution argument that UN and NGO witnesses in the field work under difficult conditions and confidentiality was needed to secure their cooperation (para 26). However, the Prosecutor’s office made a damaging concession (para 72), saying in its own evidence:

Of course, there was never any intention ... that these materials were received only for lead [finding] purposes. The point was to obtain these materials as quickly as possible for the sake of the ongoing investigation and then to allow the Office of the Prosecutor to identify the materials it wishes to use as evidence and then seek permission.

That is, the Prosecutor took the view that he could grant confidentiality first, and ask hard questions later. The result was not only a clear breach of the Statute but he also lost the practical power to control evidence, effectively putting UN legal counsel in charge of deciding what would go before the ICC.

As a result the Trial Chamber found that “the trial process has been ruptured to such a degree that it is now impossible to piece together the constituent elements of a fair trial.” This is utterly scathing judicial language.

The Chamber stayed the trial indefinitely and will hear an application for Lubanga’s release tomorrow. Unless the Prosecutor secures a wholesale about-face from the UN on the confidentiality of 200 odd documents, procedural justice seems to demand the defendant be released.

The Office of the Prosecutor must be a very unhappy workplace at present. If these are the realities of gathering evidence in the ICC, the prospects of any cases ever commencing seem pretty slim.

Curse you rain!

2008-06-21T10:44:00.007+01:00

I'm going to my first May Ball in two years, and its Coelacanth's first May Ball ever. Ah, May Balls and May Week.

... And of course it's raining. That typically English rain that if you stood out in it long enough would never be heavy enough to soak you through, but you would start to grow moss. How very familiar.

I have by now perfected the British obsession with the weather and so cross-referenced the hour-by-hour predictions on Weather.com and BBC Weather. The consensus is, it looks as though clouds will scatter and there will be hints of sun from 7-ish until sunset around 11 pm - when it will commence to bucket down heavily until dawn.

Black tie, sturdy boots and a good umbrella are called for.

Sunday afternoon postscript:

So the weather was nowhere near as bad as forecast and much warmer than a lot of May Balls I've been to.

We were able to head in early and up to a friend's rooms in college for some drinks and snacks (and a little of the football) beforehand, and when the ball itself commenced there were only two or three light bouts of misting rain.

For one of those, we didn't need to put up umbrellas as we were safely queuing for black-tie laser tag in an inflatable grid of tunnels - probably a highlight of the evening. (Along with ceidhle dancing, some decent - and indecent - stand up comedy and money-less gambling that taught me I should never be allowed to bet the farm on blackjack.)

Of nine who set out, six made the survivors' photo at 5.30 am after which Coelacanth and I got to wander 10 minutes back home through the dawn-lit streets of Cambridge and sleep until lunchtime.

It was a beautiful morning, a low English summer sun streaming over everything through the rain-cleared air. I'd forgotten how much fun it is, sometimes, to be awake before the rest of the world.

Working hard, eating hard

2008-06-17T09:19:00.004+01:00

(Above, Coelacanth's* allotment: further proof of creeping Englishness.)

"Can't blog, eating" would just about summarise the last few days.

On Saturday one of my favourite teachers from the LLM was kind enough to invite a few of us to lunch at his cottage outside Cambridge. It was great to get out into the countryside out of town. Highlights of the day (other than the conversation) included, "How many degrees does it take to get an iron bench from a shed to a corner of the garden?"; "Kissinger? Well, not all of us had breakfast with him earlier this year"; Coelacanth enthusiastically weeding a garden bed while an emeritus professor of Trinity College took photographs and finishing the sparkling wine before lunch. All very civilised.

Last night, however, was dinner at our favourite Cambridge restaurant, Alimentum. I love it if only for the fact its incredibly classy interior looks out over a busy road onto a pine furniture warehouse.

The food as, always, was really very good indeed. But the discovery of the evening was wine no.44 on their list: a French-style cabernet blend from, of all places, Lebanon. Big flavours, amazingly well-balanced and a surprisingly light body. Quite a find.

Yes, Coelacanth and I have become wine snobs. But we're self-parodying wine snobs. So that's OK.

(*If "Coelacanth" seems confusing, see comments to the last post.)

End of the teaching term

2008-06-12T09:12:00.003+01:00

“So, what do you do when you’re not teaching?”

There have been a couple of signs my first teaching year has gone well. Not all the course assessment forms have been processed yet, but I’ve scored well on the survey numbers I’ve seen so far. I’ve also had a lot of requests for reference writing, and I suppose students must think you’re OK – or somehow impressive – to ask for a reference. And, most pleasingly, some of my International Criminal Law students invited me for a drink, where the question above was asked.

In theory, I’m meant to be turning the PhD into a book. However, before I even get back to work on the book, by the end of this week I am meant to:

settle the marks on my exam with the second marker (done);
meet with my faculty-appointed mentor to check on my progress (done);
help draft an advice for a colleague (fun, but lots of work);
write a book review;
peer-review an article for a journal a colleague edits;
respond to queries from an author on the last article I peer-reviewed for a journal;
chat with a friend about a line of argument in their PhD;
speak with someone the faculty may be recruiting as a consultant/external teacher on a pilot project I seem to be taking the lead on; and
write a 3,000 word journal note on Somalian piracy (present draft over 5,000 words).

Still, I’m not complaining. It’s good to be busy doing things you enjoy, and the real upside of academic life is the variety and freedom to manage your own time.

Oh, and I’ve just discovered I may have committed myself to too much classroom teaching next year as I didn’t realise you get teaching credit for supervising new research students. Seems obvious that that should count as teaching once pointed out, though, doesn’t it?

First time for everything

2008-06-08T09:10:00.001+01:00

So, a month ago I was late for my first ever exam, the one I had set for my masters course.

As the course convenor I was obliged to be there at the start of the paper to make sure no students had problems along the lines of: “My exam paper appears to be missing/written in Chinese/the paper for another course/on fire, etc”. I also had to flip through the materials my students were allowed to bring in and check they hadn’t smuggled any forbidden knowledge in through notes in the margin.

It should be a reasonably easy thing to turn up to your own exam on time. Except, of course, the law school does not have its own exam hall and the central exam timetablers can send you pretty much anywhere. We also have a pretty spread out “campus”, which includes many anonymous-looking or poorly signposted buildings that could easily be just another office block.

Leaving - I thought - plenty of time, I set off in search of my exam. Despite the heat of the day (a rare full sun and 25 degrees centigrade in humid London), I’d worn a suit and tie. I think my idea was that students shouldn’t see me looking too relaxed while they had to face a masters’ exam. Whatever I had in mind, it didn’t work out well.

The street my exam was on was easy enough to find. No problem there. But as I wandered around the top of it, I noticed few building had numbers on display, and none of those numbers was high enough. I began to get edgy. I still had a few minutes up my sleeve, but not really enough to go back to my office, check details, and set out again.

I crossed a major road. The other side was a new street. I had a missing building on my hands.
Beginning to breath faster and perspire slightly, I pulled out my mobile to call my secretary. I say “my”, but she works for eight other people as well – mostly more senior than me. She has been around for a while though, and is a gold mine of practical information. Calling her would have certainly answered my problems.

If I’d had her number.

At this point, I did what any calm, collected young academic in a suit and hard-soled shoes would do in a crisis. I ran.

Three or four blocks later, dripping on the front desk at the graduate office, I panted out my problem and they pulled out the map of exam locations. I mentioned the street name.

“You do know that on that street the numbers run up one side to the main cross-road and then back down the other?”

Well, I did now. I’d showed up at the wrong end of the street. Good thing it was only another three or four blocks to run back.

I’ll say one thing about exam panic. At least it prevents LLM students noticing that their examiner, who’s seven minutes late, has just dried his shirt out by standing in front of the hand-drier in the men’s room.

Blogging revisited

2008-06-02T21:18:00.005+01:00

Courting Disaster has been off-line for nearly 18 months – and let’s face it, it was hardly updating regularly towards the end of that time.

So, here we are: rebooted and hopefully updating two or three times a week.

In brief, the last eighteen months have consisted of:

moving house (yes, again!) in December 2006, to the most adorable part of Cambridge, Newnham;
interviewing for three or four teaching positions and being offered a lectureship at a London university;
submitting the PhD thesis in May 2007;
marrying the love of my life in Canberra in June 2007;
being examined on the PhD in August 2007;
starting the new job in September 2007;
crawling elated, scared and knackered by turns through a first term of teaching (while commuting from Cambridge);
graduating from the PhD and having a second wedding ceremony (well, a blessing) for UK friends and visiting Australian family in November 2007;
having a quiet Christmas in Dahab, Egypt;
crawling elated, scared and knackered – but generally more confident - through a second term of teaching;
writing questions for and administering exams (and there’s a blog in that!);
marking, marking and bloody marking exams (only 84 undergraduate essays, three dissertations, 92 exam scripts and double marking the same again);
proposing a couple of new courses;
getting the PhD turned into a book proposal, peer-reviewed, committee-approved and a contract issued with a publisher; and
oh, look it’s just about our first wedding anniversary.

Busy? Just a bit.

A fourth Christmas dinner in Cambridge

2006-11-30T15:31:00.001Z

Where has the time gone? I cannot believe I've not blogged in two months. Oh, wait, that would simply be yet another hectic Michaelmas term.

I have spent, it seems, the whole term churning out job interviews, teaching and trying to finish a first draft of the final PhD chapter (slow, slow, progress).

Of course, there's also been a trip to Paris with Zoe's parents, a trip to Cardiff for a job interview and being treasurer of two student clubs (one theatre, one wine tasting).

Anyway, I was grateful to have made it to Christmas dinner with sanity more or less intact. It was another brilliantly English four-and-a-half course affair, with drinks in the master's lodge beforehand, and raucous conversation in the MCR over the last of the wine afterwards.

Some of the new grad students seemed a little startled by the tradition of tables just randomly commencing Christmas carols, and the fact that it's compulsory to stand and toast the line "five gold rings" when singing Twelve Days of Christmas.

Anyway, there is much else to report from the term, including my first ever surprise birthday party and the fact I am looking at moving for the 10th time since 2000, but that will have to wait.

I have tickets for a Christmas carol service, you see ...

Sudan and the International Criminal Court

2006-09-21T11:52:00.001+01:00

It now seems that the 7,000 strong African Union force in Darfur will remain in the Sudan with additional UN support and equipment until the end of the year.

However, it remains a "central plank of Sudan's foreign and domestic policy" to reject an expanded UN presence. Partially, this may be to allow the Sudanese government to pursue a military solution in the Sudan, unhindered by a larger, better-funded UN force with more robust rules of engagement.

In a particularly cheap ploy Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has suggested that the UN has a colonial agenda, when it is quite clear from the text of the UN Security Council Resolution that any peace-keeping force will only be deployed with Sudan's consent.

The disingenuous nature of the claim is further belied by the fact that Sudan has already admitted 10,000 UN peacekeepers in the South.

Are Sudan's leaders just making political capital from the UN and stalling for time to finish what they've started? Doubtless, but there may be other considerations at play.

As international lawyers, we are often reluctant - as David Kennedy has pointed out - to face up to the idea that our high ideals may have unintended consequences.

The International Criminal Court has been requested by the UN Security Council to investigate whether to lay charges for crimes against humanity against persons involved in the Sudanese civil wars.

The Sudanese government has taken this development seriously enough to establish its own war crimes court, presumably in an effort to block ICC jurisdiction.

The ICC has jurisdiction over crimes of individual responsibility at international law (where the territorial State is unwilling or unable to prosecute them, unless the UN Security Council grants it broader powers).

Critically, the UN Secretary General has warned the Sudanese leadership "may be held collectively and individually responsible for what happens to the people of Darfur if they allow the African Union (AU) mission there to leave and then refuse access to United Nations peacekeepers".

It's not much of a leap to conclude that the Sudanese President is not entirely off-base in:

... liken[ing] the prospect [of U.N. force deployment] to an invasion force whose goal is regime change. Analysts say the government in Khartoum fears U.N. forces would arrest suspects likely to be named in any war crimes warrants issued by the International Criminal Court.

I want to be very clear: I am a supporter of the ICC. I believe it has a potentially important role to play in ensuring that there is individual accountability for crimes against humanity. However, when referring an investigation to the ICC is used a substitute for taking real and effective action, we risk making things worse, not better.

Anyone who though an ICC investigation was necessary to establish crimes against international law are being committed in the Sudan clearly did not have a newspaper to hand. The referral was clearly a political act. (I am not, however, suggesting the ICC's investigations are anything less than rigorous and impartial.)

International law will not prevent violence and death in Darfur any more than criminal law prevents murder within our own countries. Only policing will. The only way to get a policing force into the Sudan is negotiation (especially as western powers seem to lack the stomach for a hard-line military deployment that really would be tantamount to an invasion force bent on regime change).

It's very difficult to negotiate with someone once you've initiated an independent prosecution against them and theirs. Legal prosecution makes a poor political bargaining chip because once initiated, it's hard to call off.

Referring the Sudanese "situation" to the ICC was a poor substitute for action that may now make what was always going to be a very difficult negotiated settlement next to impossible.

At best, the Security Council should have sent the ICC in after a peace-keeping force, not ahead of it.

A non-Roman holiday

2006-09-13T10:52:00.001+01:00

Photos from an amazing trip are over here.

I also have tales of random madness involving bicycle maintenance and more serious thoughts on international law I might get round to blogging soon.

In the meantime, here's a photo from Cinque Terre ...

Not sleeping, working real hard ...

2006-08-22T12:44:00.001+01:00

Okay, I know the blog has stalled (once again).

My excuse it that I apparently have most of a PhD. I had a terrifically encouraging meeting with my supervisor last Wednesday, in advance of which I thought, "Hang on, what have I got written?"

So I prepared a little table of potential chapter titles, research papers/drafts I'd already written that would fit, and a total word count.

It appears I have a rough draft that lacks an introduction, conclusion and has only half a final chapter. I still have 129,000 words towards a 100,000 word thesis.

"I'm glad it's only 129,000 words," my supervisor said. "You've been writing at a rate of knots and I'd expected more."

He glanced at my list of issues for a final, wrapping-up chapter and said: "I think you should focus on what's necessary to complete, not everything that will eventually go into the book."

That was the first mention of the B-Word in a supervision meeting. (Eeek.)

Anyway, the push is on to finish the stuff I'm working on, so I can then survey the sprawling meandering mass of my draft and identify what to ditch. (Hopefully, a lot of fisheries law.)

I'm on track to finish early; which is exciting enough that I want to press on.

Especially given that I'm going to Italy Thursday of next week for a thoroughly undeserved break.

Prison ships for illegal fisherman

2006-08-03T15:58:00.001+01:00

I've just posted over at Ozelaw on the Australian Federal Government's plan to detain Indonesian fisherman caught in Australian waters at sea.

The distressing part about the present practice of detaining fishermen aboard their boats in Darwin harbour is that it has resulted in two deaths through lack of supervision of the detainees. Illegal fishing is certainly a crime, but it doesn't deserve the death penalty. There has been little focus in the initial media coverage on how this innovation might actually improve detainee conditions.

Movin’, movin’, movin’

2006-07-15T10:07:00.001+01:00

(New desk, click for bigger image)

I’ve often blogged about how often I move. However, the last two years in Cambridge I managed to stay in the same building and just upgrade rooms. Easiest move ever: just prop two doors open and carry everything up a flight of stairs.

Now, though, I’ve finally done it. Private accommodation, outside the sheltering womb of college and onto the UK rental market. After looking at some total dives, I got lucky. There’s a flat just behind the law faculty that’s been handed down through a few generations of Trinity Hall PhD students now. The location is ideal, the rent is very good and the carpets … well, let’s not talk about the carpets.

The flat is, a rarity for Britain, let without furniture. The system that’s evolved is incoming flatmates pay the out-goer for their room furnishing and the communal bits and bobs, then add and subtract as they see fit.

I immediately wanted to subtract a desk (huge, government issue, ugly with heavy metal filing drawers), a small wardrobe with vanity (less than 30 centimetres rail space) and a chest of drawers. The drawers were amusing. You could open three of four on any given day, but with few guarantees as to which. (“Right, I’m just about ready to go out … but it seems my socks and underwear are not. Hmm …”)

So I hit the local Salvation Army store where the finest in Cambridge’s veteran and slightly scarred furniture turns up. I found a big sturdy wardrobe, an impulse-buy armchair and a mock-Edwardian, seven-drawer writing desk. The nice people there even said they’d take away my old furniture as a donation (and, frankly, a kindness) when they delivered.

I paid up and turned to leave when I saw the fateful sign: “It is your responsibility to check furniture will fit through your doors.”

I measured the width of my new desk. About 80 centimetres and thought of the narrow front door to the new flat. “It’ll be fine,” I thought.

Getting home, I measured the back of the door, 81 cm, and sighed with relief.

Then realised the door has a thickness. Opened, the thickness of the door would have to be subtracted from the width of the frame. I measured the door's thickness, 4 cm.

“It’ll be fine!” I thought, not very convinced.

Next day the Salvo’s arrived and genially hauled my first piece up the stairs: the desk. Lining it up with door, it just wouldn’t go through. It couldn’t be angled around as the stairway was too tight, the door opened into a tiny vestibule and the desk’s sides were solid.

“Um,” I said in desperation, “if you lend me a screwdriver, I’ll take the front door off its hinges.”

So, they schlepped to and fro with furniture old and new(er), while I removed the front door and parked it inside.

The desk was heaved up again, rotated on its side and gently eased towards the door frame. And stopped.

“Just needs another quarter of an inch,” one of the deliverers said. “Tell you what. Take the screwdriver and see if you can get the top off.”

Fortunately, it looked like this had been done before: a variety of screws secured the writing surface on only three sides. With the top off, it slid through. Just.

“You like this because it had character, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I answered sheepishly, “I guess I just didn’t realise how much.”

“Hmm. Do you want us to stay while you reassemble that, or are you going to buy a screwdriver?”

2006-06-25T21:36:00.000+01:00

May Week once more

Any week that ends with you having the champagne (well, Cava) stains dry-cleaned out of your pale linen suit has to be May Week.

For those who've not been lurking around this blog that long, or have but haven't paid much attention, May week is a week in June that celebrates the end of the academic year with Pimms-drenched garden parties and stay-til-dawn College balls.

This year I hit the garden party circuit harder, and kept myself to one college ball, going to the Caius (say "keys") Ball with a group of PhD mates.

That said, I may be getting old and jaded. I was feeling tired after just two days of steady-but-never-roaring-drunk drinking and pushinng on until dawn at the Caius ball felt particularly rough between about 2.30 and 4 am.

However, once dawn started to break around 4 (it hadn't been properly dark until 9.30 anyway) I perked up remarkably and went in search of a black coffee and steak sandwich. (As opposed to the mixture of voda and fruit juice that got me through the chill morning that followed the Jesus Ball last year.)

Caius is a gorgeous college and it was a good night (a photo of the college at dawn to the left).

Unfortunately, the weather wasn't 100% with us. A light misting rain was falling a lot of the night. It was that typically English rain that if you stood out in it long enough would never be heavy enough to soak you through, but you would start to grow moss. It was mostly only visible in the spotlights, but did put a dampner (no pun ...) on the outdoor activities.

Even the music venue tent wasn't totally spared: a gust of wind could send water crashing off its non-existent eaves onto anyone unfortunate enough to be at the fringes.

Still, good food, drink, company and some memorable comedy and music acts in a wonderful setting. Even if the dining room of the Senior Parlour looked mock Greco-Roman in a Las Vegas kind of a way ...

2006-06-13T13:11:00.000+01:00

Fun in the sun in France

So Monday I got back from five glorious days in the South of France. I won’t bore you with too many details, just photos.

The basic day consisted of rising around 10 for a breakfast of fruit, yoghurt bread and honey. We'd then leave the house at the crack of noon, and zip off to stand in a ruined Cathar fortress on a mountain ridge for a bit, going “Oooh, pretty.”

This was usually followed shortly by, “Right. Where shall we go for lunch?”

This in turn lead to several hours of eating far too much and washing it down with litres of Rosé, before crawling home for a nap and a late cheese-platter dinner.

It was great to see Beth, Peter and Jasmine and Clay in particular was an absolute legend for doing all the driving. This really was the neglected Southeast of France where doing anything definitely required a car.

In fact, we were so far off the backpacker and American tourist trail that the village where we stayed wasn’t even listed in Wikipedia or google!

The low tourist population was probably just as well, as few of the ruins we went to seemed very strict about safety. You knew something had to be really dangerous if anyone had bothered to install a hand-rail, safety fence or warning sign.

My French even held up to a conversation with an old guy in the markets at Narbonne about what a nice hat I was wearing. There’s even a photo of me in it over here.

The only downside was I couldn’t find anywhere to check my bags for my last solo day in Perpignan before my Ryanair flight home, and lugging them around felt rather heavy – especially when I was also probably carrying some surplus food. I must’ve eaten eight days worth of food in five …

2006-06-06T23:13:00.000+01:00

Washing my underwear for France

Well, okay, maybe I should rephrase that. I doubt France has a terribly keen interest in my underwear.

I, however, after a day of fun-filled excitement at the IMO library now am packing for a five-day jaunt to France.

(Don’t knock the IMO, by the way, their headquarters are right by the Thames and they have a cafeteria with a roof garden with a stunning view of Westminster.)

Predictably, like all last-minute packers everywhere, I was short of underwear.

Anyway, that small crisis of hand-washing dealt with, I am travelling light, light, light. Just me, a day-pack and my ambiguously hand-bag-like, yet-still-manly shoulder-bag. No checked luggage for me!

I’m headed to Perpignan to join the Beth travel extravaganza in Padern for a bit. Should be awesome.

See you in a week, if I remember I still sort of have a blog.

PS The photo was from my IMO day trip, taken on the Albert Embankment, where I also saw (but stupidly forgot to take a photo) Met Police officers on mountain bikes practicing cycling down stairs, to the bemusement and delight of passing Japanese tourists.

2006-06-03T17:41:00.000+01:00

Official charity plug: "Walk with a Rose"

The observant would have noticed the "official charity" bit I added to my sidebar last week. The curious might have asked "Walk with a Rose, what's all that about?"

"Walk with a Rose" was set up in my home town, Canberra.

It is an eight-week long walk from Brisbane to Canberra by Amy Banson to raise awareness of, and money for, acquired brain injury (ABI).

ABI refers to any brain injury acquired after birth, usually as a result of an accident.

It can result in symptoms such as memory and concentration problems, dependency, irritability, poor problem solving skills and depression. These may be mistaken for being lazy, childish or just hard to get along with.

What's important to realise is that people with a brain injury might exhibit no physical symptoms and still be unable to work or look after themselves.

The short of it is, over 340 000 Australians have an acquired brain injury, of these over 160 000 need daily assistance in living.

The majority of these, even the most profoundly disabled, will be cared for by loved ones at home.

Obviously, carers need a break, and there's a lot that could be done to expand respite care provision - especially at the best facilities that can offer Australians with brain injuries a genuine holiday themselves.

The aim of Walk with a Rose is to raise money to help pay for new facilities at existing respite care centres so more carers can get a break.

The walk's already attracted corporate support from ACTEW/AGL in Canberra and the endorsement of the National Brain Injury Foundation.

So if you were thinking of giving something to charity in the near future,
do consider the "Walk with a Rose" campaign.

More details and on-line donations at: www.walkwitharose.com.au.

2006-05-27T10:44:00.000+01:00

An international lawyer and his pirate kangaroo.

2006-05-15T22:04:00.000+01:00

Stumped!

Something of an inglorious start to the cricket season.

There is an unfortunate assumption in England that all Australians know how to play cricket. Fortunately for me the standard for entry into the Trinity Hall graduate cricket team is: “Have you eve caught a moving object?”

In the sense that it is vital a team have an eleventh man to be allowed to play, I am vital.

In fairness, I’m not a bad fielder. Not a particularly good one either. I can’t bowl, and can generally just about block a ball with a bat. My best contributions are probably made in close proximity to the score-board, or zealously guarding the boundary line from balls that slip past the inner ring of fielders.

Still, I like the standing about out doors, the occasional running, the ebb and flow of the game and the really devastatingly excellent afternoon teas put on by our MCR stewards and treasurer and usually billed as “as big as the whole world!”

Which would be true, if the world were made entirely of cucumber sandwiches, strawberries and cream and Pimms mixed according to our treasurer’s secret recipe.

So you’ll imagine things are looking a bit grim if I’m sent in to bat. In our first game Sunday against Churchill college, we bowled first and were set a chaseable target of 122 from 20 overs.

Unfortunately, we suffered a bit of a mini-collapse, and while the run rate was on target, we were going through batsmen.

When I was one of the last three on the bench I headed out to the nets for a warm-up.

Ludicrously, my legs were too thin to do the pads up with the Velcro and I had to tie the straps in a knot. Still, I had fun in the nets, and by the final over was never expecting to hear the call.

Then, on the third ball of the final over we lost a batsman. The score was 121. One run to tie, two to win, three balls remaining as I trudged out to the pitch.

Our penultimate batsman was facing the bowler. With three balls left, I figured anything he hit might require running. So I edged forward from my crease, sort of forgetting it was his job to call the runs.

A nice straight block sent the ball back down the pitch towards me, where a quick-witted fielder took it, saw me out of my crease, and pegged it at the stumps.

A lunge with my bat was, lamentably, not enough to save my ignoble 45 seconds on the pitch.

Still, at least everyone on the team – and I do mean just about everyone – was courteous enough to think the result close enough that it was some decisive personal contribution of their own that had sealed the defeat.

A good game though, and a great result for Churchill who were so short of players last year that I was sent in to bat for them …

2006-05-12T14:27:00.000+01:00

Why have I not been blogging of late? Well, frankly the weather has been too good. I've been trying to work dilligently through to the early afternoon (a point between 3 and 6 pm depending on the dilligence and virtue of friends) and then hit a beer garden.

Anyway, mostly for my mother I've put some photos of the flowers and blossom where I live under 2006 Spring at Wychfield.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to prepare to give an international law tutorial on the lawn outside ...

2006-05-01T21:35:00.001+01:00

Darfur: background to the conflict in the Sudan

The high-water mark for peace prospects in Sudan probably came in 2004 with an agreement between the UN and the Sudanese government that it would disarm militias and facilitate humanitarian aid efforts. Eventually, 2000 African Union troops were deployed to the Darfur region. However, peace talks between the government and the two rebel factions (the Movement for Justice and Equality and the Sudanese Liberation Army) have consistently stalled over disarmament.

Two years of hand-wringing later and the UN has managed only limited sanctions against Sudanese leaders and a referral of the situation to the International Criminal Court. The ICC, of course, will not be able to act until after the dust has settled – having no power or ability to swoop in and seize suspects.

The stalemate arises from the fact that the Sudanese government won’t allow UN peacekeepers in until a peace agreement with the rebel factions has been signed.

According to the New York Times, the UN Security Council doesn’t want to send a force in as a compulsory measure under Chapter VII for a number of reasons. First, China and Russia would not support such a move. Both China and Russia have strong economic links with Sudan, especially China which accounts for 64% of Sudanese exports and 10% of its imports. Second, there has not exactly been a rush to volunteer peacekeeping troops by the international community.

But what are the origins of the conflict? Typically, the Guardian has an excellent interactive timeline and Le Monde has quite a good summary of more recent events.

Sudan is ethnically, religiously and linguistically divided between a predominantly Arab/Muslim north and an African/Christian (and Animist) South. In Darfur province in the Northwest the janjaweed militia (basically government proxies) have been attempting to drive out ethnic Africans. There are many internally displaced persons as a result, and many international refugees who have crossed into Chad.

The situation has certainly heightened Chad/Sudan tension, with both sides accusing the other of supporting anti-government rebel groups within its territory.

While there were Christians in the Sudan area in the sixth century, the present conflict probably has nineteenth century roots. In 1882 a rebellion expelled Egyptian and British colonial rule and established a strict Islamic state; the rebellion was only suppressed by the colonizers in 1889. Sudan was then jointly administered by Egypt and the UK until its independence in 1956.

Promises of self-rule for the south within a federal system were reneged upon by the new independence government sparking civil war from 1955 to 1972. The war was rekindled in 1983 following the imposition of Sharia law on non-Islamic people in the South. Another possible reason for the central government’s reluctance to relinquish any control of the South is that it holds 75% of Sudanese oil fields.

That said, the present rebels in Darfur (the northwest) are a somewhat separate issue from the old North-South civil war, except insofar as the conflict has clear ethnic overtones with Arab militias (backed by an Arab government) attempting to displace the African locals.

2006-04-30T20:44:00.000+01:00

Turkish Star Wars

Allegations of copyright infringement in popular culture are ever with us. The basic idea behind copyright being that you can't copyright an idea, only a reasonably detailed and concrete expression of an idea.

This is the most obvious reason the Da Vinci Code case failed: the idea that Christ may have married Mary Magdelene and fathered a line of French kings, while certainly not first Dan Brown's, was scarcely an idea subject to copyright.

Those who did undergraduate intellectual property, however, would probably remember a classic case falling the other side of the line - the Italian re-make of "Jaws". This resulted in the Australian case Universal City Studios v Zeccola, where it was held (for the purposes of an urgent injunction) there was an arguable case of copying.

The judge at first instance, in the words of the appeal court, "with some
degree of fortitude, viewed both films, one after the other" before ruling for the makers of "Jaws".

With considerably more fortitude I settled down to watch "Turkish Star Wars", perhaps one of the best bad foreign films imaginable. Actually, it's so bad as to be beyond imagination, so just go watch it - if you can find a copy, which will be hard for reasons I'll mention later.

The titles alone say it all. Some of them are visibly painted on cardboard and "faded out" by the simple expedient of rushing them towards the camera and off to the left.

It begins with a monologue that's incomprehensible, even with the aid of subtitles, uttered over a backdrop of footage of early NASA launches and random bits of Star Wars space-fight footage mashed together. Unfortunately not enough footage, so what they have they loop three times (a money-stretching trick this production crew ain't too proud to use over and over again).

We then have fighter pilots, who appear to be standing either in front of TV screens or a back projection of more Star Wars space-battle footage, in motorcycle helmets.

Our heroes are then shot down and land, apparently, on the evil over-lord's planet. They must defeat him before he can penetrate the shield of projected brain-molecules that defends the earth. (At least I think that was what was going on.) Along they way they must save the oppressed locals from his evil army of chubby skeleton warriors, dudes in halloween masks, mummies, guys in tin man costumes, giant muppets with bad claws, and an eight foot yeti thing that seems to flail victims to death with streamers.

Moments to watch for:

- crashing your space-fighter in such a way it disintegrates, but you crawl from a sand-dune unharmed!

- kicks that land nowhere near the bad-guys but send 'em sprawling!

- "Ouch, that hurts!" moments when it becomes painfully apparent there are no stunt doubles

- when care bears attack! Men in giant pink bear suits attack children with their cardboard claws!

- a devastating mystical sword, obviously made of cardboard and shaped like lightning!

- our hero, trapped and bound to feindish devices by ... telephone cords!

- evil sorcerous villains, drinking their victim's blood through a bendy straw!

- that yellow, swirling special effect: when it turns up, it spells trouble!

Best of all, when the evil villain is sliced in half: "This is one of the more tricky visuals from the Turkish effects wizards: he is filmed while one half of his body is in shadows, then they go to a shot of him with the other half of his body in shadows. It seems impossible, but both halves of him ended up with his whole nose."

The reason you'll have trouble tracking this gem down? In a delicious result for a film made with no concern for copyright (it's soundtrack is composed of scraps from Indiana Jones and Flash Gordon, too) it is only available on bootleg DVD ...

2006-04-23T15:56:00.000+01:00

Photos of my recent sojourn in North America are posted over here under "2006 US Trip"; my apologies to Cananda for not adding "and Vancouver" to that title ...

2006-04-10T01:02:00.000+01:00

Oh Canada!

Presently in Vancouver, staying with M and K. I arrived at the end of quite a long journey that started at 5 am in Philadelphia (or 2 am Vancouver time) and ended with getting into Vancouver on a bus from Seattle airport after 6 pm. Much cheaper, though much longer, to cross the border by land if you can afford the time.

Other than catching up with old friends, indigenous art has featured pretty high on the agenda. The Anthropology Museum has an astonishing collection of memorial (ie burial) boxes, door posts, potlach masks and totem poles. The symbolic depictions of real and mythical animals are enormously striking. Also, fortunately for my white middle-class guilt complex, they seem to have a very healthy relationship with the local first nations at the Museum; so these artefacts are largely voluntarily placed with the museum, not a monument to looting.

I've also rapidly come to appreciate Vancouver fashion sense. It rains a fair bit here and winter is long. Aboout 97% of people outdoors are wearing jeans and sneakers and either a North Face fleece or a waterproof jacket of some desciption. The other 3% are wearing jeans, black boots or slip-on leather shoes/clogs and a quilted jacket.

No wonder everyone can pick me a mile off as "visiting" in my jeans with (shock!) a red wool jumper and tan linen jacket.

Still, M and me were mistaken for a gay couple methinks by a couple of private gallery owners when we were wandering around town this afternoon. Quite amusing to be treated as serious potential buyers. Especially on my income.

Philadelphia

My time in Philly was also brief, but well spent. Major highlights of my stay with Im the archaeologist were the local Art Museum and the Liberty Bell centre. Sorry, "center". The Musuem is a gobsmackingly impressive pile built along late-Roman empire lines, with a healthy dose of ziggurat thrown in for good measure.

The main foyer looks like the steps could comfortably lead off to an area reserved for human sacrifice, but is dominated by a huge sculpture of Artemis (or Diana or some other Roman goddess with a bow) who apparently used to be a weather vane. Weighing, I would guess, a good half a tonne. Always important to know from which direction your hurricane-force winds are blowing.

In a lovely counterpoint, a huge white Alexander Calder sculpture hung from the ceiling. I dragged Im through the French Impressionists, she gave me the medieval high-lights tour and showed me where bits of Thai and Chinese temples, along with European monastic courtyards and Japanese tea-houses, had been artfully reassembled. (Hurrah for looting!).

The Liberty Bell exhibit was really well thought through, and a good introduction to the history of the object. Among other things, I learned that it was only renamed the "Liberty" Bell when its symbolism was taken up by the anti-slavery movement.

It also struck me, for the first time, that the opening paragraphs of the declaration of independence are actually a brilliant exposition of the principle of self-determination at international law as we now understand it. (Well, more or less.) Hardly surprising, given that it was drafted by so many lawyers.

Right, nap time.

2006-04-03T23:49:00.000+01:00

Taking international law on the road

Spring had finally sprung in Cambridge on the Thursday of week before last. I could cycle without gloves and beanie, the daffodils were out and so, increasingly, was the sun.

What a fool I was to think that was Spring.

I'm currently blogging from a front porch in Washington DC, where it's been positively balmy since I arrived. Sunny, 20 degrees plus, and blossom on all the trees. There has been one - ONE! - cloudy day in the week since I arrived.

I need to move back to a warmer climate.

Anyway, blogging has been interrupted by the madcap antics of the American Society of International Law annual conference and my research trip. Okay, so "madcap antics" really doesn't describe ASIL.

Like any conference there were amazing, stimulating and thought provoking panels; and those that left you asking: "How the hell did you get invited to speak?"

I also had a great two-hour meeting at the State Department today about international fisheries law. (Tomorrow I talk about drug smuggling with the Coast Guard.)

Still, the real experience has been staying with friends in Washington DC's north-west. Over here, near T and 5th, my hosts are among a gentrification influx. The neighborhood around has a fine heritage, but not perhaps the best track-record on safety and criminal behavior. (One of my hosts has been mugged, late at night, on his own doorstep).

Basically, when walking around here you're liable to be the lone white guy: certainly a different feeling for me to be part of a visible minority. Once you cross 13th street though, the racial balance visibly shifts - and by the time you hit Georgetown, there are almost no black faces.

Still, even as the hopelessly naive gangly white guy off to a conference or meetings in a tie and suit jacket, I've felt quite at ease. Everyone is terribly friendly and helpful.

Okay, a nasty storm is breaking. Time to take this indoors and off-line.

Blogging will be pretty erratic over the next two weeks. Next stop: Philadelphia!

2006-03-21T21:37:00.000Z

Lawyers, wildlife and metaphors

Funniest opening for a professional article I’ve read in a while:

“Most lawyers do not spend a lot of time camping in the wilderness, and probably very few have ever come face-to-face with a cougar. But confronted with that situation, any good lawyer would know in a flash that it is essential to escape without getting eaten. Risk management and goal assessment are among the profession's most indispensable skills.”

If you’ve ever gone on a hike in the States without memorising “16 different anticougar gambits” prior to departure you’re clearly not a litigator.

It’s all from piece by Steven Lubet in American Lawyer about lawyers and their excessively risk-averse and detail-obsessed behaviour, or as he puts it “cougar-spotting”.

How to tell the difference between obsessive time-wasting that pads a client’s bill, and catching the trick that’s going to cost your client a bundle?

Where a safety-first mentality has become redundant is clear in “over-lawyered” contractual clauses using every possible synonym for debt.

(“Hey Tony. This wise guy says because his contract wit’ us covers ‘arrears, bills, checks, chits, claims, commitments, damages, debentures, debits, dues, dues, incumbrances, invoices, liabilities, manifests, mortgages, notes, obligations, outstandings, receipts, tabs, tallies and vouchers’, his ‘gambling markers’ are excluded. Whaddya say?”)

The ordinarily useful attention to detail is demonstrated by a, for example “a ‘risk of loss’ provision [in real estate transactions], in case the property burns down between the contract signing and the closing date. That doesn't happen very often, but it's a cougar when it does.”

But then we have that fabulous anecdote, the one time payoff that justifies (or provokes) a lifetime of obsessive behaviour:

“A litigation partner at a large Chicago law firm told me that he always personally examines the handwriting on the significant documents in his cases, whether or not there is an allegation of fraud. That may seem pretty aggressive (and time-consuming), but he once noticed that two signatures-one on a letter and the other on a promissory note-seemed virtually identical, down to the last squiggle. Consulting a handwriting expert, he learned that no two signatures are ever exactly alike, unless one has been copied or traced. And sure enough, it turned out that a crucial letter had been forged. That successful bit of cougar hunting saved his client a couple of million dollars, and he has been diligently comparing signatures ever since.”

That’s why you’d hire a corporate lawyer, and why many sane people aren’t interested in being one. (Why didn’t the client notice the damn forgery?)

Still, it exemplifies nicely the trust no-one mentality of many law firm partners.

2006-03-20T22:24:00.000Z

Why do women leave law firms?

A recent NY Times piece is asking the right questions, but is frustratingly slim on answers.

“People explain it simply as the fact that women have children, but so many other factors play into it … ”

Great, what are those factors? Well, they mostly seem to be poorly defined and explored intangibles.

The “roadblocks” seemingly include “errant mentoring, opaque networking opportunities, low-grade case assignments or arbitrary male control of key management committees”.

But then we’re back to discussing the:

“ ‘maternal wall’ on female lawyers … built on the unstated assumption among male partners that women who return to firms after having children will automatically be less willing to work hard …”

Okay, accounting firms apparently do better:

“Deloitte & Touche … has promoted and retained women by offering flexible working schedules, leadership development and career planning programs, and transparent and dedicated mentoring ... Deloitte also maintains generous sabbatical policies and outreach practices so that women who depart the firm to raise children have an easier time re-entering the work force — and rejoining Deloitte — when they are ready to do so.”

This sounds great, but is not explored in any more detail. So what’s the bottom line problem with law firms? Billable hours. Quelle surprise.

“Research … has also identified an inflexible, billable-hours regime as an obstacle to job satisfaction for both sexes, a trend that is more pronounced among the most recent crop of law school graduates.”

“… analysts says [billable hours are] increasingly cropping up as an issue for male lawyers as well ... Billing by the hour requires lawyers to work on a stopwatch so their productivity can be tracked minute by minute — and so clients can be charged accordingly. Over the last two decades, as law firms have devoted themselves more keenly to the bottom line, depression and dissatisfaction rates among both female and male lawyers has grown … many lawyers of both genders have found their schedules and the nature of their work to be dispiriting.”

Try downright depressing. One female colleague described her first two years in a law firm as “monkey work”: an intellectually unexciting hard slog a chimp could perform.

But wait, suddenly the key problem isn’t gendered? It’s just billable hours? At some levels this seems plausible, but only if you assume some men simply don’t notice not having a life beyond work, and hence more men stick around to make partner.

So, how did one successful two-partner marriage balance work and family, especially with one child with a learning disability?

“[They] engineered this by cutting back on their social calendar, sharing household chores and making sure that at least one parent was home for dinner most nights.”

Good on them for making it work, but forgive me if I think this vision of an absentee household staffed by help and family seems a bit grim. Yet this is the best life in a law firm can offer.

One quote that really rang true?

“Law firms like to talk about running the firm like a business … but they’re running on an institutional model that's about 200 years old … Most law firms do a horrible job of managing their personnel, in terms of training them and communicating with them.”

Indeed, their sink or swim mentality coupled with a business model that assumes a 30% staff churn rate has little need for retention or engagement with its “fee earners”. The day firms acknowledge they have an actively failing human resources model is the day any of this may change, for men or women.

2006-03-18T20:37:00.000Z

A hard week’s dining

Looking back over my blog, I’ve had surprisingly few entries about black tie dinners. Then again, even in the course of the usual end of term madness I’ve seldom been out to this many formal dinners.

The dining score-card for 8 to 15 March 2006 would read:

Total number of dinners out: 5, of which three were black tie dinners (one with academic gown), one with suit and tie, and the last a quite dinner with a mate.

Looking back, I came out of the gates too fast.

At the last “regular” grad hall of term on Wednesday the 8th, I had two friends come along from the Blind Wine Tasting Society. We rather lost sight (ha ha) of the fact that “blind tasting” is meant to be about sophisticated wine appreciation – not getting, well, blind.

Three people, four bottles, multiple car pile-up of hilarity ensues - lasting until 3 am that morning. My hangover, however, lasted much longer.

After a brief respite, on Friday it came time to dust the lapels of my tux, sponge the mud from the inner leg (didn’t I dry-clean this last time? no matter) and trot off to the undergraduate law society at St Catherine’s College annual dinner.

The observant will have noticed I am neither an undergraduate nor at Catz.

I was invited by my students as an external supervisor. I was touched to be asked, but flattered when I realised how few “externals” get invited to a lovely dinner for only about 30 people.

I could only suppose that to be invited you had to be regarded either as important or cool. As I’m not even remotely important, it seems my teaching style may have rendered me popular. A theory confirmed by being one of only two or so “oldies” encouraged to head over to the Catz bar afterwards – which mercifully had stopped serving alcohol.

Saturday saw me hand washing my one formal shirt and heading off to the feast of St Edward King and Martyr – yes, really – at Trinity Hall. This was my college’s thank-you dinner to those who’ve supervised (tutored) Hall students over the year. Three courses (including a fabulous saddle of Spring lamb) with wine, a cheese course, a digestive break where you stand and go into another room, then chocolates and fruit with claret, dessert wine port and coffee.

Afterwards the remainder of the wine, along with scotch and, oddly, beer was on offer in the Senior Combination Room – and it was good scotch.

Highlights of the evening included finding myself chatting with real enthusiasm about how my students were getting on, and the odd jibe about having been one of the elect invited to the Catz dinner.

Tuesday I headed out on the town with a friend who’s been to busy helping to write a UN report on top of her PhD to be seen much this term. After a decent dinner at the chain bar “Bar Ha Ha”, we repaired to the bar at Trinity Hall for our second bottle of vino and law chat.

Which kept me nicely in form for the black tie graduates end of term dinner at Trinity Hall on Wednesday, at which I neither drank excessively nor stayed out too late. No, really.

Anyway, so much to say that if I haven’t been blogging, it’s because I’ve been too busy eating.

2006-03-16T22:33:00.000Z

When the West Wing Fails You

Other than the odd burst of mindless flag waving, I love “The West Wing”. So, I was sitting down watching season four tonight, the episode where they decide – a little belatedly – to take legal advice on the consequences of assassinating a terrorist leader.

A terrorist leader who also happens to be an accredited diplomat to the US.

The discussion runs something like this.

President Martin Sheen: “Article 51 of the UN Charter allows a nation to wage war in self-defence.”

Lawyer: “The article is predicated on openly declared wars.”

Pres: “The world doesn’t work like that anymore.”

Lawyer: “The law does … this could be a war crime.”

No, no, no, no! Bad Aaron Sorkin, bad bad man!

Admittedly, I just supervised undergrads on this stuff, so maybe I have a bee in my bonnet.

Anyway: the UN Charter does not require declarations of war. Article 51 does not even mention war. It talks of an “inherent right of … self-defence if an armed attack occurs.”

Can you claim self-defence against terrorism? Well, it’s controversial. But I’d say after the Security Council in Resolutions 1368 and 1373 recognised the US’s right to act in self-defence following September 11, the answer has to be “yes”.

How far that right extends is a question for another blog.

The idea that law is graven is stone, anachronistically resistant to change and irrelevant to current concerns is also wrong. There is some scope for progressive re-interpretation of the Charter’s meaning in light of subsequent practice.

For example: there is, strictly speaking, no “veto” in the Security Council under the Charter. Certain votes require the “concurring vote” of all five permanent members. So there's at best a default veto: even an abstention by a P5 member should torpedo a motion requiring a “concurring vote”.

In practice, only express negative votes are counted under this rule and a blind eye is turned to abstentions. Despite the words plain meaning, their legal meaning has changed through their use in practice.

So, similarly, there’s nothing stopping the content of the words “self-defence” evolving over time.

So is such an assasination a war crime? Whether civilian leaders are legitimate military targets in a war is a debateable issue, as is the application of the law of armed conflict to a war on terror.

However, assassinating a diplomat returning to his own country is, one would think, rather against the spirit of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

For a usually relatively intelligent show, sloppy errors teenage delegates to a model UN should be able to pick up.

2006-03-12T21:22:00.000Z

Only in the UK ...

I am a big fan of BBC weather online. However, only the UK could need an icon for "sunny intervals with scattered snow."

Which was the weather Thursday before last: hence the photo below of my outside door.

Snow in March. Damned British weather.

2006-03-02T11:00:00.000Z

Great powers and legal subjects in the making of counter-proliferation law

It seems the nuclear club just got bigger. Certainly, India’s had nuclear weapons for years and has stood deliberately outside the NPT system. However, the Bush administration’s effort to accommodate its civilian power program in exchange for it being quarantined from military research and subject to IAEA safeguards is an interesting step towards containment and tacit acknowledgement of nuclear power status.

In part, the US is probably interested in seeing India (the world’s largest democracy, after all) become a counter-balance to China. What I’m interested in, though, is what the non-proliferation tells us about the structure of power in current international legal relations and law-making.

Gerry Simpson’s argument in his excellent Great Powers and Outlaw States is that the great powers adopt an approach to international law based on whether they think their power is waning or still growing. Those that are aware their era may be passing will favour a rules based system that attempts to cement their current position in place. This was the United Kingdom’s aim in negotiations over the UN Charter. The Security Council was a deal between a declining great power (the UK) and two still-rising great powers (Russia and the US). France and China were added essentially as afterthoughts: China in particular as a regional balance against Japan.

Thus, it is scarcely surprising in an era when the US feels its power to be in the ascendant it’s academics, politicians and policy-makers often seem impatient with current international law and want to push the envelope (far more so than their diplomats and generals). Meanwhile European powers cling to UN procedure as the touchstone of legitimacy. It was ever thus.

Simpson also puts the point that great powers politics usually results in several tiers of international rules. Roughly speaking, the great powers claim certain privileges or exemptions not available to others, the mass of law-abiding or “civilized” States live within the constraints and protections of the law, while demonized “outlaw” States are denied the protection of the law but are also subjected to an intensely discriminatory regulatory law (sanctions).

How does this play out in counter-proliferation? While there has been much talk of the US “hegemony” or a “unipolar” world, I do not think the US is claiming any special privileges as a sole super-power. Despite the rhetoric of the “war on terror” the US has not been prepared to claim unique rights only it may exercise, or declared a unilateral policy of great-power intervention (à la the Brezhnev Doctrine). Iraq looks increasingly exceptional: the final chapter of a previous era of intervention, not the herald of a new dawn of global regime change. It is an exception that proves no particular rule.

The US is acting, in fact, far more like a great power in a phase of consolidation rather than expansion. Like a consolidating great power it is interested in creating new, and discriminatory, legal structures that favour its position.

It does not openly disclaim that it is a subject of the law, but it is far more interested in being the first-among-equals within the club of law-makers. Legislators can make laws that apply equally to all, but will never realistically apply to them. “The law in its majesty forbids both rich man and poor man from sleeping under a bridge.”

It wants a system that preserves WMD among a club of “responsible” weapon holders and that prohibits others from obtaining them. Logically, this now dictates either sanctioning India, or brining it further into the fold. India, for its part, may finally have stepped closer to the seat at the law-making table it’s been after.

Next: the law-making club and the unequal international law of non-proliferation.

2006-02-27T19:19:00.000Z

Only the finest in non-lethal weapons ...

Rabbits appear to have been troubling the gardeners where I live. The answer? These cute little (and, after one week, seemingly entirely ineffective) non-lethal rabbit traps.

The idea is that the rabbit is lured in by the tasty carrot, stands on the elevated ramp to get at it, the ramp then falls, in turn pulling the the pin holing the door open - and voila, caged bunny.

Shame the rabbits don't seem to like 'em and that the wind seems able to blow the doors shut ... I re-set one of them myself for this photo.

2006-02-25T20:01:00.000Z

Rap, rap, rapping the gavel of justice

Perhaps one of the finer moments of US Judicial humour in a footnote arrived in the my e-mail inbox in the form of the appeals judgment in US v Murphy (4 May 2005, 7th Circuit).

The case was about witness intimidation in – of course – a crack-smoking trailer park:

“On the evening of May 29, 2003, Hayden was smoking crack with three other folks at a trailer park home on Chain of Rocks Road in Granite City, Illinois. Murphy, Sr., who had sold drugs to Hayden several years earlier, showed up later that night. He was friendly at first, but he soon called Hayden a “snitch bitch hoe”(1) and hit her in the head with the back of his hand. He said he saw her name in discovery materials from his son’s criminal case and that she was responsible for putting him in jail. …”

The footnote at (1) reads:

The trial transcript quotes Ms. Hayden as saying Murphy called her a snitch bitch “hoe.” A “hoe,” of course, is a tool used for weeding and gardening. We think the court reporter, unfamiliar with rap music (perhaps thankfully so), misunderstood Hayden’s response. We have taken the liberty of changing “hoe” to “ho,” a staple of rap music vernacular as, for example, when Ludacris raps “You doin’ ho activities with ho tendencies.”

Delicious.

2006-02-17T09:02:00.000Z

Iran’s nuclear programme: what’s going on?

Okay, so we’ve all heard the phrases: Iran has resumed uranium enrichment, it’s torn UN seals off research installations, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) might refer it to the Security Council.

Indeed, Iran’s chief hope of stalling UN action appeared to be negotiating with the E3 (France, the UK, Germany) and Russia. Now France’s foreign minister has said that as no civilian program could explain the Iranian nuclear program the situation is simple: it’s a clandestine military program.

What the hell is going on? Here’s my effort at an idiot’s guide. (My apologies that this has become a very long post).

(1) Isn’t Iran obliged not to pursue nuclear research under the Non-Proliferation Treaty?

No. Iran is a party to the NPT, but it only prohibits the non-nuclear weapons States (everyone but the US, UK, France, Russia and China) from having nuclear weapons. There is nothing wrong with a civilian nuclear power program, indeed Article 4 of the NPT preserves the right “to develop research, production and use of nuclear power for peaceful purposes.”

The other problem with the NPT is there’s really not anything much wrong with enriching uranium to weapons grade. There’s also no prohibition on a parallel weapon program that could be used to deliver a conventional explosive or nuclear bomb by missile. A State could do both legally, pull out of the NPT on three months notice, and then put them together.

It’s this lack of a safety margin that explains why everyone is so concerned about IAEA inspections, it’s the only guarantee of good faith that States are not moving to a weapons program (see below). It’s also a requirement under Article 3 of the NPT that all States sign up to an inspection program.

(2) What does it mean to “resume uranium enrichment”?

There’s a great diagram over at Le Monde. It’s pretty comprehensible even if you don’t read French.

The basics are these. Like most things dug out of the ground, unrefined uranium is not very useful. Refinement turns it into “yellowcake” powder, which is 75% uranium. Heated in the right conditions the yellowcake becomes uranium hexaflouride gas (or UF6). The UF6 can be refined into the seriously useful type of uranium (U-235) by spinning it in a centrifuge. As the Guardian puts it:

“Uranium is enriched by spinning it at supersonic speeds in centrifuges. Hundreds of the machines are needed to obtain enough material for a bomb.

Diplomats said in September that Iran could have serious technical difficulties in enriching uranium on an industrial scale, which requires getting the centrifuges to work in cascades.”

If you’ve got enough cascades of centrifuges to refine it, or “enrich it”, improving the concentration of U-235 to 3-5% you can run a power plant; refine it to a concentration of 90% you have weapons-grade material. The other possible problem is that a civilian nuclear power program may itself produce material useful in weapons.

(Scientists, correct me if I’m wrong, please.)

So, Iran is “resuming” this process because in 2002-3 it had its first go at it. When they were caught out by US spy satellites and agreed to let the IAEA in, the IAEA found uranium enriched to a level well beyond what was needed for a civilian program. In 2004 the IAEA accused Iran of being less than fully frank with it, and Iran agreed to a voluntary suspension of enrichment activity. This is where the talk of “UN seals” comes in: Iran let the IAEA secure the facilities.

There’s a useful timeline, again at Le Monde.

(3) What’s the fuss about IAEA inspections?

Put simply, the NPT requires parties to enter inspection arrangements with the IAEA but does not provide a lot of detail. In practice the IAEA has negotiated “safeguards” agreements, also called Additional Protocols, allowing strengthened inspection measures (such as visiting on short notice) with most parties to the NPT (there’s a table of them here).

The point of such inspections is to give the world confidence that nuclear material is not being diverted for military purposes. However, States commonly have concerns that IAEA inspections might allow commercially sensitive information to leak to other countries (essentially, a fear some inspectors might engage in industrial espionage). The tension between inspectors, hopefully acting for the global good, and State’s legitimate fears about sensitive information is reflected in Article 7 of the IAEA’s own Model Protocol on inspections, providing that the State and the IAEA:

“shall make arrangements for managed access under this Protocol in order to prevent the dissemination of proliferation sensitive information, to meet safety or physical protection requirements, or to protect proprietary or commercially sensitive information. Such arrangements shall not preclude the Agency from conducting activities necessary to provide credible assurance of the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities at the location in question …”

Inspections in Iran have been carried out in accordance with such a Protocol.

The catch is Iran isn’t strictly bound by an Additional Protocol. One was negotiated between Iran and the IAEA in late 2003. It was signed, but it never entered into force.

It is quite common in international law for agreements not to be binding upon signature but only upon later “ratification”. This usually means taking the treaty back home and complying with any national law requirements before depositing an instrument of ratification, at which point the treaty may enter into force for the ratifying State.

Iran, however, has never taken the step of bringing it into force but rather has pledged to apply its Additional Protocol pending entry into force. So they can thus call their co-operation with the IAEA voluntary, and claim a right to stop it at any moment. It’s really a very clever legal strategy.

(4) So where to now?

The UN Security Council does not have to wait for the IAEA, legally speaking, before it declares that a State is pursuing a nuclear program that constitutes a threat to international peace and security. Once it has found such a threat, it can impose sanctions that UN members are obliged to implement.

The SC’s powers to protect international peace and security are sweeping. Even if Iran is doing nothing illegal under the NPT per se, or even if it withdraws from the NPT and is no longer legally bound by it – that’s irrelevant if the SC considers that it poses a threat to peace and security. So Iran's argument that it's not presently in legal or technical breach of NPT commitments may be - in a very narrow sense - correct; but that's hardly the point, especially given its history of trying to conceal part of its program from the IAEA.

What the IAEA process provides is a mechanism for diplomacy and a forum for Iran to build confidence that its nuclear program is intended only for civilian purposes. So why is it playing at diplomatic brinkmanship?

My guess is not that they necessarily want nuclear weapons, they want to pose a credible threat that they have the capacity to build nuclear weapons. When you’re sitting in a highly unstable region, and the US is busy redecorating in your next-door neighbours and has branded you part of an “axis of evil” – it’s not perhaps entirely unreasonable to want to possess your own nuclear deterrent.

It’s just a really high-risk strategy if what you’re after is security.

Update on Iran (20/02/06)

According to Reuters Iran now appears to have poured cold water on Russia's offer to enrich Iranian uranium within Russian territory (thus preventing Tehran from diverting it for weapons, but allowing a peaceful power program). While they may accept it, they will not abandon research into further enrichment.

2006-02-14T09:55:00.000Z

(Image from BBC online)

Crossing the road safely with Dr Who: 70s style!

This is very odd, rather than "stop, look and listen!" we have Jon Pertwee explaining to ice-cream hungry youngsters how to "SPLINK!" - the most bizarre safety (non-)mnemonic imaginable.

Still, his suit and final facial expression are quite amusing.

Props to the BBC for digging out such archival treasures and putting them online. Shame about the picture quality, though.

2006-02-10T11:23:00.000Z

Clearly not fearsome enough: students and food

A student back from Singapore gave me these tasty apricot filled baked treats after the Christmas break.

In addition, I've been invited to the annual law students' dinner at one of the colleges for which I supervise students (provide tutorials) in international law.

I'm guessing a college student law society is only going to ask you to attend one of these shin-digs if you're either: (a) important; or (b) regarded as alright/potentially fun to have around.

So, as I clearly wield no power at all, I'm guessing I'm doing OK on the whole fair-minded and dillgently prepared supervisor thing. Yay me.

I've also managed to lose my fear that my supervisees will find this blog (hi guys!).

2006-02-07T22:23:00.000Z

"Picked by" ... wow, He's working at the video store?

So, I subscribe to a DVD rent-by-mail service. It's a fantastic idea, I pay them 8 pounds a month and get four DVDs in the mail. No late fees, two at any one time, I post one back they post one out. I get to update my rental selections on line.

It's genius.

But there's still a human element. Someone, and I do mean Someone, has to pack the mail bag.

(Look closely at the "Your item was picked by line" above the address, if you haven't already.)

It does indeed look as though my increased attendance at evensong choral services in Cambridge has not gone un-noticed upstairs.

Yes, I know I should be blogging about Iran's nuclear program; or cartoons, free speech and religious respect - but this is too darn funny.

PS The DVD that arrived in this packet? "Monty Python: Quest for the Holy Grail." 100% fact.

2006-02-02T22:55:00.000Z

Big, ugly and very valuable: patagonian toothfish

People might remember the embarrassment for the Australian government, when the crew of the Viarsa 1 went free in November 2005 after being acquitted by a jury in Perth of illegal fishing in the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone off the Heard and MacDonald Islands north of Antarctica. It was the crew’s second trial, the first being abandoned when the jury failed to return a verdict. In the meantime they’d spent two years living in seaman’s hostel in Perth.

So, what’s all the fuss about fishing in Australian Antarctic waters?

Well, for a start the toothfish are supposed to be managed under the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources 1980 (CCAMLR). While not being endangered, they do take 10 years to mature and over-fishing risks taking juveniles before they can breed.

Secondly, it’s big business. These are big fish (they can grow to over 2 metres) and the meat is worth a lot in US ( where it is sold as “Chilean sea bass”) and Japanese markets. The economics of their over-exploitation is remarkable.

Treves has succinctly describes the “common pattern” of IUU (illegal, unregulated and unreported) fishing for Patagonian toothfish in the CCAMLR area:

Fishing vessels flying various flags and most often involving Spanish interests … engage in long-term fishing cruises in the waters of the Southern Ocean. The wealth of the fish – especially Patagonian toothfish – in the vast expanses of the Southern Ocean, and the relatively remote chance of being caught while fishing in the economic zones of France (Kerguelen and Crozet Islands) and Australia (Heard and McDonald Islands), are the main attraction for such expeditions. The financial stakes are considerable, given that a full cargo of Patagonian toothfish can equal or exceed the value of the fishing vessel involved.

In two cases before ITLOS (the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea) this proposition has been starkly demonstrated. When the Monte Confuco was seized by France the evidence before the Tribunal was that the vessel was worth $US 345,000 while its cargo of toothfish was worth approximately $US 1.5 million. When the Volga was seized by Australia the vessel was valued at $AU 1.8 million, and its cargo of toothfish was sold at tender for $AU 1.9 million. (See Tullio Treves, “Flags of Convenience before the Law of the Sea Tribunal”, 6 San Diego Int’l L.J. 181 (2004-2005), 181-2).

However, law enforcement in this part of the world is hard. It’s extremely remote and inhospitable environment with weather conditions often making boarding vessels dangerous, if not impossible. It’s no coincidence that most Australian boardings of vessels found fishing illegally have usually required military assistance and boarding by fast rope from Navy helicopters.

Some of these cases often involved lenthy hot pursuits in difficult and dangerous conditions: the South Tomi was pursued for 15 days across 3,300 nautical miles, while the Viarsa pursuit lasted 21 days and covered 3,900 nautical miles. Third States provided military assistance the eventual boarding of both the South Tomi (South Africa) and Viarsa (South Africa and the United Kingdom).

Thus, Australian experience suggests IUU fishing vessels are willing to go to significant and dangerous lengths to evade capture and are often under instruction not to surrender to law-enforcement vessels unless absolutely necessary. The risk-taking appears to be related to the potential economic gain.

It has been said that the profits to be made, given that only one or two voyages may be needed for a significant return on the cost of the vessel, make IUU fishing for toothfish potentially more profitable than drug or people smuggling (see Baird, “Coastal State Fisheries Management”, (2004) 9 Deakin Law Review 91).

This has driven Australia to described the practice before the CCAMLR annual meetings as “a highly organised form of transnational crime”.

Indeed, when Australia stopped the Lena and the Volga on the same day, it appeared that the two vessels were in communication and Australia led evidence before ITLOS that suggested these two Russian-flagged vessels were part of a larger IUU fishing fleet owned by one family through a company in Jakarta (see the Volga Case transcript, ITLOS/PV.02/02, p. 28 at ITLOS).

It just goes to show if there's enough money in it, there's nothing disorganised about crime.

2006-01-29T21:45:00.000Z

The Palestinian election

For what little my opinion is worth: I think the Hamas election victory could well become a step forward for peace in the Israel/Palestine dispute. I think Israel and the west will have no choice but to negotiate with the “Change and Reform” parliamentary party, and I think a new breed of Hamas politicians will have to distance themselves from terrorism and the core aim of the destruction of the Israeli state.

I am not about rewarding suicide bombers here, merely making a pragmatic prediction. Once Hamas has to govern, once it is responsible for tax collection, spending aid money and the day-to-day governmental grind of providing roads, water and schools – it is going to have a much harder job selling itself to its now (greatly enlarged) core constituency. Government involves compromise and the experience tends to soften radicals.

Hamas was not elected, it would seem, by a newly radicalised Palestine. It won as most oppositions do: because people were sick of the incumbents. These are not electors who will be impressed by renewing the insurgency against Israel: they want a functioning economy, basic services, and freedom of movement through Israeli managed checkpoints. Those will be the yardsticks of Hamas’ success or failure now: not its ability to cause bloodshed.

It will be in the new parliamentary Hamas members’ interests to clamp down on militarism or distance themselves from it. If they want international credibility and the aid money that goes with it, they’ll have to.

Further, Israel is still the occupying power throughout much Palestinian territory and is thus responsible for basic services. Getting the occupying power to fulfil its obligations means negotiating with Israel, which some Hamas leaders already do.

On the other side, if Israel wants security in its own borders, it has to solve the Palestinian question. And if it won’t negotiate with Hamas who will it negotiate with? Permanently closing the border and leaving the Palestinian economy to (further) stagnate and the Palestinians to starve isn’t a realistic option. Which means refusing to talk to terrorists isn’t an option: though it may be a tactic to try and wring concessions from Hamas about a strengthened cease-fire and modifying its charter goals.

A Hamas parliamentary wing, let alone a government, gives the international community significant leverage to hold the militants to account. The difficulty will, of course, be in how all players manage any splinters of Hamas who inevitably decide in coming months and years that the parliamentary wing are ‘sell-outs’ and go it alone.

2006-01-26T13:23:00.000Z

Cime of the day

An exercise of universal jurisdiction is where a State makes it a crime before their courts for anyone, anywhere to commit a certain act. With this in mind I found the following passage drily amusing:

"... in United Kingdom law universal jurisdiction is asserted in sections 47 and 51 of the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, in respect of the offence of knowingly causing a nuclear explosion without authorisation. The Rule of Law is a wonderous thing."

(See Vaughan Lowe's chapter on "Jurisdiction" in Evans (ed), International Law).

2006-01-24T22:27:00.000Z

"Clearly an act of stupidity"

One of the more bizarre local crimes to have been committed recently in Cambridge involves posting a hamster.

A couple of undergraduates living not that far from me decided to post a hamster in a bizarre act of revenge to a man who they claimed had threatened one of them. Apparently, after there had been complaints about a man loitering about their college (on one report kerb-crawling and abusing students) the pair had tailed a suspect home and become embroiled in an argument.

The reason given for such an idiosyncratic revenge:

"to cause confusion - I suppose to make him look after it".

That and they claim to have been "plastered" at the time.

The hamster, subsequently called "First Class", was saved from death by mail-sorting machine through the attentive intervention of a postman. The pair were found guilty of, and fined heavily for abandoning an animal in circumstances likely to cause suffering.

In a statement reproduced in student papers but not the mainstream media, the pair apologized but also made a comment about the the diligence of the RSPCA in securing their prosecution compared to the local police's activity to find the loitering man they blamed for their woes.

They also made a rather ill-judged comment about "society's priorities" and the number of lives that could be saved by a donation to Oxfam equivalent to the public costs incurred in their prosecution. Well quite. But hardly the kind of half-hearted expression of contrition likely to endear them to the general public, though certainly not crass enough to justify the subsequent (and cowardly) hate mail to one of their families.

2006-01-23T22:08:00.000Z

Being foreign

I'd be the first to admit that Australian universities don't often do their peachy-fresh best by international students (especially given the cash they bring in) in terms of creating a smooth application process.

Indeed, now being a foreign student myself and subject to the varying whims and idiosyncrasies of Cambridge bureaucracies, I have some sympathy for the confusion and terror that can be engendered through the process of applying to study abroad.

I can even believe that there exist in parts of the world "education agents" to recommend universities to those wishing to study in Australia and who will, for a fee, guide them through the application process.

What a shame they may prove no more use in the application process than a bootful of old cheese.

From a friend working in foreign student admissions, I present the e-mail she wish she'd sent to one such agent:

"Dear Ms X,

Thank you for your utterly unnecessary letter regarding your client, Mr Y.

As I am sure you can appreciate, there are a very large number of students who choose not to complete their enrolment until the last minute. Nor is your assumption - specifically, that you are entitled to special treatment on the basis that you can operate a fax machine - unusual.

Your efforts are, however, made more unique by your timing, and I am gladdened to see that you take your responsibilities so seriously as to require urgent completed enrolments within hours of making payment. Such a keen work ethic is to be admired.

As a professional courtesy, may I take this opportunity to remind you that in the majority of efforts to increase efficiency, underlining doesn't work. This is true irrespective of how many times it is used. The same can be said of the use of an "urgent stamp". There is a well-established inverse relationship between how many times the stamp is used and how effective it is.

May I also suggest that in future, you carefully analyze where the important information is found on any given letter, and avoid marking that section with a stamp of any kind.

I would also recommend that you request from your employer that you be allowed to undertake further training in the basic functions of a fax machine. This will allow you to send each page of your faxes once, as opposed to sending the same page one hundred and fifty times.

Warm regards, etc"

Oh dear. Anyone else had their own work held hostage by the incompetence of others lately?

2006-01-20T16:48:00.000Z

Jet-lag-o-rama

Sorry to have been absent a while. January ran away with me, and then became a downhill run to returning to Cambridge.

Some statistics (believe them or not!):

Total time spent in transit, door-to-door, from my parents house to my room in Cambridge: 34 hours.

Time spent hanging about at airports (Canberra, Sydney, Singapore, Heathrow), as opposed to flying: 7 hours.

Sleep gained on flight: 2 hours.

Number of movies watched: 5 ½ (Everything is Illuminated, The Corpse Bride, Must Like Dogs, The Constant Gardener, The Brothers Grimm and bits of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigilo).

Pages of international law material read on the flight: nil.

Number of sudoku (easy and medium only) attempted: 10

Number of sudoku completed: 9

Bus trip, Heathrow to Cambridge: 2 hours, 45 minutes.

Time difference between Eastern Australia and the UK: 11 hours.

Average time spent in bed before waking up desperately confused: 2 hours.

Current half-time score: jet lag – 5; Doug – 2.

Fortunately I have a weekend to get myself together before I begin supervising undergrads again on Tuesday. Shame I need to read Pinochet (No 3) in that time as well …

2005-12-27T23:35:00.000Z

Holiday Reads, Part 3: "On Beauty"

Headline: a great talent, a little burdened by the easy cliché

I’ve been struggling to write something on “On Beauty” for a while. I think Zadie Smith is a terribly talented writer, but my response to this novel is a little ambivalent.

Let’s start with the good. Smith’s prose is exceptional. Her ear for speech and dialogue is fabulous, and her ability to inhabit the skin of a character regardless of age or gender compelling.

The story gets off to an interesting start. The Belseys are a mixed race family: Howard is a British academic living in the US who has trouble with faculty politics and thus getting tenure; Kiki is a black American woman, political rather than intellectual, and a hospital administrator. The marriage thus embodies some neat tensions of class, politics, practice/theory, and culture: boundaries the children of the marriage need to negotiate.

It is a tribute to her sympathy for her characters that despite all the stupid, hurtful and wilfully self-obsessed things Howard Belsey does, I found it impossible to entirely dislike him. Indeed, I felt a certain sympathy for him, which Smith seems to feel herself. This is pulled off not through any especially redeeming features on Howard’s part, but because (as with all the characters) when we see the world through his eyes, it is drawn so compellingly in Smith’s lush observational prose.

Also, Howard finishes the novel humbled if not repentant. Ultimately, despite all the damage done to himself and others, Howard’s acts seem adolescent rather than mercenary. He profits little by them and does not really aim to; he stumbles into things out of a failure to appreciate consequences which a man should really have outgrown by his fifties.

However, by writing in the mode of affectionate academic satire, there are ideas the Smith excuses herself from pushing further. Howard’s refusal to engage with emotion or aesthetics (he claims to hate Mozart and has founded an academic career on the idea of Rembrandt as a merely competent tradesman) comes off as wilful affectation. Rather than portray him as one “clinging to his rhetoric of disenchantment as if it were a religion” (to quote an excellent Slate article), Smith leaves Howard apparently without strong beliefs - making many of his actions seem like parts of a childish game.

More to the point, Smith creates a bevvy of interesting characters some of whom dissapointingly lapse into jargon or ultimately conform to stereotype before simply evaporating by the end of the novel. The final moments of confrontation and resolution also seem rather, well, stage-managed.

Smith has the potential to be a writer of much wider scope, and I’d hate to see her lose her warmth and humour to write “serious social novels”; but somehow when her novels come to rest on comedy and satire for their resolution it feels a little like cheating.

2005-12-25T23:38:00.000Z

Holiday reads part 2:
Brett Easton Ellis, “Lunar Park”

Headline: Beth said it best

I was keen to check out Lunar Park after it made Beth’s top 5 for 2005 and was drawing praise from other friends as well.

I devoured it over two days, and Beth’s assessment of it being by turns “hilarious, clever, spooky, then sad” is spot on.

It’s actually the first Ellis I’ve read, and the (supposedly) autobiographical introduction is an enormously witty “imitation of himself”, a stylised and at least partially true account of his rise to prominence and the “American Psycho” controversy. I’ve never had the stomach to read “American Psycho”, but trust the reviews that the film captured much of the humour and ambiguity while omitting the baroque violence.

If “American Psycho” was fundamentally a parody of the emptiness of money-obsessed big city America, then “Lunar Park” is an excoriation of the emptiness of suburbia - and a pretty compelling post-modern horror novel. The “emptiness of suburbia”, you say, isn’t that a bit trite; a little twee and “Desperate Housewives“?

It’d be a fair criticism, if this weren’t a novel first and foremost about materialistic, status-obsessed parenting and how a generation of parents driven by personal freedom are as capable of screwing up their kids as their hidebound 1950s parents. The depiction of lethargic children on a cocktail of behavioural drugs at a “rehearsal party” supervised by a paediatrician is as funny as it is awful.

(The parent/teacher night gag about appropriate ways to draw a “normal” platypus is also a small gem.)

That and it’s a novel about being haunted by the memory of your father and a seriously nasty novel you once wrote, as well as … well, the forces of supernatural evil (maybe).

It is also wildly clever. The author-turning-himself-into-character shtick has seldom been done so well, deftly manipulating the conventions of both “I-never-knew-my-father” autobiographical fiction and the straightforward small-town horror genre. (His heavily ironic disclaimer about having done no research into the “true” events of the novel is also an overdue call for a return to imaginative, as opposed to footnote-driven, fiction.)

Despite the trappings of autobiography, one is left with the distinct impression you know little more about Ellis, other than the fact he’s a damn clever writer.

2005-12-25T05:16:00.000Z

Holiday reads part 1:
Sebastian Faulks, “Human Traces”

Headline: wildly over-hyped historical novel of mad-doctors, schizophrenia and evolution

Right, I’ve not read “Birdsong” or “Charlotte Gray” - which many rave about - but while “Human Traces” would comfortably fill a long weekend at the beach, it’s a trifle frustrating.

The historical detail on the origins of psychiatry as a field of study, and early theories on “mad-doctoring” is engaging. The provocative thesis of one of the central characters, the improbably named Dr Thomas Midwinter, that our capacity for language is also the origin of madness but that at one stage of (pre-literate) human development the ability to “hear voices” was vital to human existence is certainly engaging.

Indeed, the historical detail and evocation of place is usually pretty good.

It’s just a shame the characters are all so flat and either unsympathetic or laughably idealised. The women, to an indistinguishable one, have a near psychic ability to intuit what the menfolk are thinking and feeling and are - frankly - concerned with little else. In a depiction of what is meant to be life in all its vicissitudes, it must be said that success comes rather easily. Unless married off by unfeeling parents, characters seem to fall in love by a second meeting at the latest, and are unproblematically engaged soon after.

There is the tragedy of the first world war, and the campaign on the western front and in the Italian mountains. Pity that much the same territory was covered so much better in Hemmingway’s “Farewell to Arms”.

Most of the splash about “Human Traces”, other than suggestions the subject-matter was inspired by Faulk's mother's experience of mental illness, was made by the Oxford don Professor Tim Crow who was a little concerned (rather endearingly) about whether “it matters if the facts are right in a novel” - basically an accusation that Faulks had lifted a theory of his and anachronistically given it to a character who, on the basis of knowledge then available, could never have conceived it. Faulks apparently found the idea distressing. I have trouble appreciating the problem.

Faulks rather sententiously disclaims the practice of concluding a novel with a list of references “as though all art aspired to the condition of a student essay.” I find, however, some of the rather thinly veiled and clunking exposition of scientific thought rather much in a novel; though lamentably this category contains many of the novel’s most interesting passages.

Indeed, the most interesting idea in the novel, that all humans once “heard voices” and had a direct psychic (or psychiatric) experience of the divine is attributed in the acknowledgements (really a bibliographic essay) to Julian Jaynes.

I have no trouble with fiction presenting interesting ideas, but find the contemporary insistence on historical accuracy stifling and entirely unnecessary. I rather liked Bet Easton Ellis’ apologetic disclaimer of having done know research into the “true” events of “Lunar Park” and am rather looking forward to a novel that does not occasionally feel like a textbook with all the footnotes missing.

2005-12-15T23:04:00.000Z

Baa!

So, I am staying at my parents' house in the countryside outside of Canberra.

My mother is having a bookclub lunch today, and I will escape to the ANU law faculty library while Dad helps out.

However, we've had an unexpected visitor.

Mum woke up this morning to find a black-faced sheep, all cotton-wool fur and spindly black legs, standing on the terrace looking in the bedroom window.

Just the one lost sheep, parachuted in, as it were, from nowhere.

Very Wallace and Gromit.

2005-12-13T10:30:00.000Z

Flashback to jet-lag in the making: in-flight movie reviews

The 40 year old virgin: not just American Pie for grown-ups; foul-mouthed, but rather sweet and with few gross-out jokes.

Who woulda thought condoms and chest-waxing could be so funny?

Cinderella Man: y'know the screenplay Barton Fink writes, about a wrestler who is emotionally and physically (but mostly physically) in tights? Who faces down an evil opponent? To rise heroically from his tenement origins? Yup, this is Barton's film.

... And man, does boxing ever make me feel ill. How is bludgeoning someone unconscious a sport in a civilised world?

Batman Begins: a novel take on a modern myth, dominated by the quest for psychological realism (and big toys!), betrayed by an ending one wishes disbelief could suspend.

Yes, I'll still go see the sequel.

Sky High: high-school - it's where geeks turn out to be cool, your girl-friend turns out to be your worst enemy, your worst enemy turns out to be your best friend, and your best friend turns out to be your girlfriend. Oh, and it's where you go to learn how to use your heriditary super-powers.

NB: Cheerleaders are evil.

Something's Gotta Give: old wrinkly people with heads full of character date young, featureless people with heads full of air - before realising they love each other. I think.

I dunno, I only watched the last 20 minutes.

2005-12-12T10:00:00.000Z

On being a Phud

It's a bit like being 19 again, staying with your parents on an extended basis as a 30-year old. Having to borrow the car, explaining when you'll be away overnight and who you'll be with (just so no one worries), calling to confirm if you'll be home for dinner, and ... well, not having anything approaching an office space. Not bad, or difficult, just odd.

Anyway, a further 19-ish experience was a weekend in Sydney, getting lifts both ways with grown ups. A salient reminder that I am a grown-up myself was an evening in Leichardt with friends from uni: all law graduates. All but one had done time in corporate law firms.

One had jumped from the Tax Office to corporate law, one had started there and stayed there, one had gone from corporate law to a public broadcaster, and one was in State government. Then there were the two PhD students, me and an English PhD student now based in Melbourne (the amazing Beth).

So Beth and I managed the Phud conversation: "I can't believe that some weeks I can write a thousand words a day, and others I'm beating my skull in to finish a paragraph ... some books I tear through, others take a week to crawl through taking notes". Okay, not the exact words we used, but the gist.

The Phud conversation is valuable: while all work-talk is potentially boring to others, we're an isolated group who need the peer support to keep going. As people, we read to know that we are not alone. As humanities Phud students, neither blessed by nor shackled to a lab group or office, we have the work conversation to escape our little boxes and gain some perspective on what is "normal".

In at least one survey, half of those discontinuing graduate study rated isolation as an important factor for leaving their studies (especially, it seems women).

I guess this is one thing I get out of being in Cambridge in particular: if you want to be isolated in Cambridge, it's easy. Stick to your room and your lab or library and don't socialise. A good number do this. However, if you want a social network of other graduate students - it's there on your doorstep. My college in particular is known for being small and friendly.

Frankly, I think being surrounded by people who know psychologically and emotionally what being a Phud is like is amazingly helpful. It's not that other friends are insensitive, but the invisible support of peers - especially across subjects or disciplines - is a major part of maintaining the morale to keep going.

That, and fear. Fear is really useful too.

2005-12-11T08:54:00.000Z

Wrenching this thing back on course

I've been away from regular blogging for a while, I realise. Partly that's been the fact of coming back to Australia for the holiday season and getting over my usual vicious jet-lag.

But, regardless of jet-lag, Couritng Disaster has been adrift for a bit. I've been very busy of late with the PhD and my first ever semester's teaching and have felt a bit - well, busy to be blogging.

Strange, though, that I could always find time for it when working at a much more time-constrained desk job and even - more or less - through the chaos of my masters year.

First, I think blogging was simply a novelty, and my writing was mostly humourous pieces, reviews and the odd legal issue. Then it was a document of what could well have been my one and only year in Cambridge.

Now, with my life beyond blogging gathering steam, it seems important to re-focus on what I expect to do with this blog.

I think I really want it to be, rather more self-consciously, the blog of a PhD student. This is in itself a weird experience, and one worth recording.

So expect stories of teaching undergrads (including the odd mildly humilatiing piece of on-the-job learning), failed efforts to do PhD reading on long haul flights, and the trials and tribulations of trying to get a few publications out there.

Dammit. I have a book review to finish over Christmas as well.

2005-11-30T22:39:00.000Z

Full circle

Cycling home from my third Christmas dinner in college (I have been here a frighteningly long time now) a strange thought struck me.

When I first found out I would be coming to Cambridge for my Masters, a friend in the Federal Court loaned me her copy of Phillip Allott's "Eunomia" to read. It's a dense and difficult book, but quite inspiring in its depiction of what international law could be, not what it is. (His "Health of Nations", while still tricky, is a much easier read).

I still recall the sense of wonder it evoked, the dizzyingly alternative perspective on a subject I thought I knew, as I read in snatches on a late-winter tram in Melbourne traveling to and from the Court.

Despite never seeing myself as a legal theorist, I took Professor Allott's History and Theory of International Law course; an experience that more than anything else inspired me to stay on for the PhD.

And now, two years later, tomorrow night I am taking the colleague who leant me the book (who has also landed in Cambridge) to a discussion group and supper hosted by Professor Allott.

Funny how things sometimes come full circle.

2005-11-26T23:12:00.000Z

Bad character deportation

The Robert Jovicic case seems to have touched a nerve, and exposed something I have considered scandalous for some time: the number of people who should be Australian citizens, but aren’t by mere oversight, and who are expelled every year from the only country they’ve ever known.

For those who don’t know, Jovicic is one of many dozens of individuals every year – people who have spent all their lives here and are Australians in all but the paperwork – who the government expels for being “of bad character”. They are then “returned” to the country of their birth, where they may not speak the language or even have access to employment rights or welfare.

In my time working at the Federal Court, this type of case always struck me as unusually heartless, driven by the utterly inflexible use of section 501 of the Migration Act.

Section 501 allows the Immigration Minister to cancel your visa if you fail a “character test.” You automatically fail the test if imprisoned for 12 months on one occasion, or a total of two years over more than one occasion.

Now, if someone arrives in Australia as an adult, on a working visa and commits a serious crime – they should be deported.

What angers me is the way, as in the Jovicic case, this provision is used to deport people who are only not naturalised citizens by their parents’ error.

Every year people migrate to Australia with infants and just forget to naturalise them. If they get into trouble later in life, this leaves them vulnerable to deportation to a country where they may have no contacts, no language skills and where – as in the Jovicic case – the national government may either not recognise your citizenship or have revoked it on the grounds you have been out of the country all your life.

These people are being subjected to an extraordinary double punishment, which is also utterly arbitrary. The victims of this system have served their time, but are punished again by deportation – a punishment that wouldn’t apply to them had they been naturalised. It is also a punishment that is utterly disproportionate to the nature of their crimes, these are usually small-time drug offenders who supported their habit through burglary or cheque-bouncing: not armed robbers and rapists.

These people are scarcely major-league threats to the community.

It seems a bit much to expel someone from the only country they’ve ever known because they’ve done two years for burglary – especially when you’re chucking them out of a country founded upon the transportation of a home-grown criminal class.

2005-11-24T23:14:00.000Z

Moments not to forget your camera ...

So, I was cycling to the train station today. As anyone who has ever visited Cambridge would know, it's famous for its rising bollards.

Yes, yes, centuries of tradition, punting on the Cam, Harry Potter gowns, what really freaks people out are the rising bollards.

The edges of the down-town pedestrian area, and certain taxi-and-busses only points in the one-way system, are guarded by these stout metal poles about 3 feet high that rise out of the ground. There has been much debate about how they work, but a cabbie informed me vehicles that are allowed to pass are fitted with transponders.

anyway, the bollards at the edge of the pedestrian area rise at 10 am and lower at 4 pm, Monday through Saturday.

Today, as I passed the set near august St John's college, there was what looked like a roadwork crew milling about and a car parked in front of the bollards.

All I thought was: "Do they expect me to get off and walk, or can I just duck round the side here and carry on?"

As I did just that, I glanced back.

A gorgeous, new model silver VW Beetle was precariously astraddle two semi-risen bollards: one under each tire. The left one had come about two-thirds of the way up, the right only about a foot. The Vee-Dub's bumper sloped forlornly left-to-right.

Someone must've tried to slip past at 10. Or not know of their existence. Or had their clock set wrong.

And I didn't have my camera, dammit.

2005-11-20T23:01:00.000Z

Japanese Whaling in ‘Australia’s’ Antarctic Waters

You might think that if illegal whaling was occurring in Australian waters, there might be a Court in Australia where you could challenge that activity. However, if those waters are off Antarctica, you’d be wrong.

In two judgments in the one case Justice Allsop has refused leave for the Humane Society to start proceedings in the Australian Federal Court regarding the whaling activities of a Japanese company in the 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zone (“EEZ”) that Australia has declared off the coast of its Antarctic territory (see Humane Society International Inc v Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha Ltd [2005] FCA 664 and [2004] FCA 1510).

The most recent judgment was in May, so you’ll have to excuse my being a little behind the times.

So, in brief at international law a State can proclaim a 200 nm EEZ off its coast, and in that area pass laws relating to natural resources – including fisheries – and enforce them even against foreign ships. Australia claims part of the territory of Antarctica and has proclaimed an EEZ adjacent to its coastline. So any whaling there is subject to Australian law and you could bring a case under Australian environmental legislation, right?

Well, as it turns out, no.

The basic reason for this is the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which has about 46 parties or so, including Australia. The genius of the 1959 Treaty is that it ‘freezes’ all territorial claims in Antarctica, including those which overlap (those of Argentina, Chile and the UK) and provides that nothing done there will count as a claim of sovereignty and no State will make new or enlarged territorial claims. The trade-off is that all States are then free to send scientific missions wherever they please, and all people present in Antarctica are governed by the law of the State that sent them.

Now, here’s the tricky bit. Under Article 6, the 1959 treaty applies “to the area south of 60° South Latitude, including all ice shelves, but nothing in the present Treaty shall prejudice or in any way affect the rights, or the exercise of the rights, of any State under international law with regard to the high seas within that area.” The 1982 Convention on the law of the sea enshrined the idea of the 200 nm EEZ. Prior to which, it was usually assumed all States were free to sail, fish (or whale) upon the high seas without being subject to another State’s law.

So, does Article 6 mean Australia is allowed to assert a high seas right that came along later than 1959 (the 1982 EEZ), or that Japan’s vessels enjoy the freedom of the high seas?

(Alright, I’m setting aside questions here of the Whaling Convention and later environmental treaties on Antarctica.)

Only four countries in the world that acknowledged the Australian claim of territorial sovereignty in Antarctica (Norway, New Zealand, France and the United Kingdom), and it is not clear that this extends to the Australian Antarctic EEZ. Of 46 parties to the 1959 treaty, the inconclusive support of only four makes it quite likely that any State who had a flag vessel arrested in that area would challenge the lawfulness of Australia’s EEZ jurisdiction and might well win.

The Japanese view would obviously be that Australia has no right to apply its environmental legislation to this area.

Basically, the argument put by the Australian government was that this was a matter of international relations and enforcement of these laws would prove embarrassing and possibly damaging to the national interest (ie a definitive ruling against the EEZ by an international tribunal now could prevent it later being more widely accepted later).

The Court was very careful to say that these submissions from the government did not purport to direct the Court as to the outcome or interfere with its independence. However, its established as matter of case law that the Courts will seldom go against government submissions on international relations issues.

Also, rather importantly, the Court found that allowing the case to proceed would be “futile”. The case concerned leave to serve process on a Japanese company in Japan. It had no assets in Australia and there was no way to compel it to appear in Court in Australia. Thus, there is every chance the case would be ineffective, as well as diplomatically embarassing (and, in my view, very likely contrary to international law).

Leave was granted to appeal on the same day as judgment, though I doubt the outcome will be any different on review.

2005-11-18T11:25:00.000Z

St Paul's Cathedral, London.

2005-11-17T23:24:00.000Z

Everybody’s talkin’: the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations

So, I’ve been to a couple of great talks this week. Yesterday, one on UN reconstruction efforts in Liberia, today an account of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

The speakers were to be two friends, a former negotiator from each side, both old friends now, but in the end only the former Israeli military lawyer could make it. He was still remarkably balanced.

It seemed that at least one of the reasons he was kept at the negotiating coalface 12 years was that – perhaps surprisingly – all stakeholders tended to see him as relatively neutral and objective in negotiations, precisely because he was from the military and not a political appointee. He struck me both as a true believer in the peace process, and a hard-headed pragmatist.

Just some of the little details he mentioned about the early days were telling. Not knowing how to speak to address the other side at first (the answer being, in the end, as people), decisions about what to wear (should serving officers attend in uniform?) and the problems of negotiating with Palestinian delegations who had sometimes not met each other, or even their head of mission, before the meetings let alone having had time or the resources to prepare.

Some of his views were surprising. He supported negotiating with groups his government regarded as terrorists, and having them involved in political processes. The idea being that once extremists become politicians, at least some of them will begin to be caught up in political reality and start to make compromises like everyone else.

He also predicted no major work could be done on present negotiations until the middle of next year when both Israel and the Palestinian Authority come through their present electoral cycles. No-one, on either side, it seems is ever willing to negotiate with a potential lame duck – there’s no guarantee your concessions to them will buy anything from their successor.

He spoke of goodwill and good people on both sides, and the saying “It’s hard to hate in person.”

He also acknowledged, but shrugged off, the one-State thesis: the idea that the solution is not two separate states, but one integrated one (the South African model) – especially given the presence of settlements in the occupied territory.

His view seemed to be that with political will, such as the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, settlements didn’t matter much. Obviously they matter a great deal to those on the ground, but he regarded the issue of territorial boundaries as being – while still very complex – relatively simple compared to the intractable wrangle that will be the final agreement on the status of Jerusalem.

He acknowledged that sometimes complex legal deals are a good thing, as they allow the result to be spun for domestic consumption as a win by all parties, such as the Israel-Jordan water deal which is capable of being presented as all things to all parties. However, he seemed of the view that anything but a simple solution would fail in Jerusalem because of the complexity of the interests involved.

A very interesting evening, given my recent efforts to explain the status at international law of the Palestinian people to undergraduates.

2005-11-14T22:05:00.000Z

A little older, as the weather’s turnin’ colder

So, today I turned 30. Hopefully an auspicious moment to return from blog hiatus. I’ve been treated to a couple of gloriously sunny, if incrementally colder, winter’s days. Quite reminiscent of winter in Canberra: strong sun, a still and cold day outside, high blue sky streaked with cloud. Until recently, there was even a bit of an Indian summer: great weather for photos, some of which I hope to get up soon.

In a significant move, today was the first day I wore gloves cycling. The wind froze my hands bad enough last night that when I got off my bike coming back from the pub (and, well, London) I hardly had any feeling left in my little fingers.

“But you’re 30!” I hear you exclaim, “Doesn’t that scare you at all?”

Actually, no. I’ve eased into it. My first birthday celebrations were over a week early on 5 November. It just so happened on that date I could persuade a friend who’s a college fellow (read, academic) to book a nice wood-panelled college room for a party. Together we sorted out a selection of four different wines and I instructed all guests to bring cheese. A lot of very civilised, if slightly tipsy, wine tasting and cheese eating followed.

Saturday, I was at a London friend’s 30th near Tower Bridge which kind of took the spotlight off me for a bit and gave me some company in the aging process. Actually, other than catching up with friends, a real highlight of the night was seeing the Tower Bridge lit up on a cold night. Quite magnificent.

And so I stumbled back into Cambridge on Sunday in time for a night at the pub with a friend whose birthday is tomorrow. Earlier this evening I even crept away to a wine tasting where I got to taste a half glass of a 1990 French Cabernet that now apparently sells for £120 a bottle. Rather worryingly, it tasted not that much different to most red wine as far as I’m concerned.

So yes, relaxed, comfy and a little older. Possibly a little wiser and feeling more settled in my life path (academia, ho!), but certainly no taller this birthday (see photo).

2005-10-28T08:15:00.000+01:00

Only sleeping ... (and books as "the new snobbery")

May as well make it official: I am taking a little break from my increasingly erratic updates of Courting Disaster. There will probably not be much posted next week either, but I'm hoping for a rested return to form thereafter.

Meanwhile, perhaps I shouldn't feel quite so intimidated at the thought of how many people seem to be taking the Booker Short-List assault course: unlike Beth, many apparently buy prize-listed books just to look more intelligent on the tube, or when their bookshelves are being inspected by friends.

2005-10-17T21:47:00.000+01:00

I lost my balloon!

So yesterday was a very Christopher Robin evening. Matters started ordinarily enough: after a Sunday morning's lazing about, I marked an undergraduate essay and went to a housewarming BBQ. So far, so pleasant and autumnal.

But then I had to help set up for a club squash. No, not a lemon drink.

A "squash" in Cambridge is generally a drinks function where the jaded old committee of a club or society meet the newly-minted enthusiastic first years and attempt to fill them with enthusiasm for the society and its good works, and with alcohol, in about equal measure.

Normally: many people, small room, hence squash.

Not so our almost venerable (but hip) little organization. We managed to put on a fairly civilized spread in a pleasant room, with jazz playing on someone's iPod speakers in the background (I wonder whose?) and weren't too crowded at all.

There were also blue balloons.

Now, a point to note is that I am one of only two grads on the committee and the only boy on the committee at all. The average committee member age is probably 21 and only because I and the other grad are both turning 30 this year.

So, while packing up, one of my fellow organizers asked: "Do you like being the only boy on this committee? What's it like?"

"It's like have a nine or ten younger sisters. Terrifying."

"We always feel reassured when you turn up to things. Like there'll be someone sensible around to look after us."

"You know, I'm sure that's said about Christopher Robin in the Pooh books: '... and everyone felt much better now that Christopher Robin was there.'"

To compound the image, I then got to take home a blue balloon tied to my backpack as I cycled through the night. But, as I can now warn you from bitter experience, knot that little sucker tightly if you expect it to be there when you get home.

2005-10-13T23:01:00.000+01:00

The hep jazzcats of Cambridge

On Tuesday I was walking just round the corner from where this photo was taken, when I was stopped in my tracks by the sudden familiar tones of a muffled trumpet in seven short bursts from above: "whah-wha-whah-wa-wah-whah", like a happy duck quacking through molasses.

Then, crump, a heavy set of piano notes fell down behind it, then picked themselves up into swiftly developing riff that went loping off around the trumpet quack before the drums and bass kicked in.

Clark Terry and the Oscar Peterson Trio, one of my favourite jazz records was being played at death-metal volume over Trinity Street. (Listen to the opening over here.)

I really, really hope it was some undergrad new to the joys of Oscar showing off to a friend, or just lounging back and murmuring: "Like, yeah ..."

2005-10-11T22:28:00.000+01:00

Trying new things

So, as I mentioned below, I repaired my bike yesterday. An operation that would have taken a competent bike mechanic 20 minutes I pulled off in a mere two hours with the aid of eHow.com, which claims to provide “Clear Instructions on How To Do (just about) Everything” (I want to search it for instructions on creating WMD but something tells me this could look bad later).

When Malcolm sold me the bike (hi Malcolm!) I’d recalled he’d left me some spare inner tubes, and presumed he’d also left me some tyre levers. Tyre levers, may I say, rock. It is surprisingly damn difficult to prise a bike tyre off its rim, or get it back on for that matter, without leverage.

Further, it was the rear wheel I had to change: meaning I did all this without destroying the gear assembly or getting the chain hopelessly tangled. (Both of these would take talent, but I’m not ruling out my powers of destruction).

Anyway, the new inner tube is in, despite my worst fears I got the tyre back on the wheel, and the wheel back on the bike. What’s even better: I don’t seem to have caught the inner tube between the tyre and rim anywhere – which would insure a tear in the tube and, hey presto, back to square one.

All up, I am feeling like a man who could be bike-mechanic sexy. (See the entry for March 23, 2004 over here somewhere. Just don’t blame me for my stupid archives … )

Oh, and today I taught undergrads for the first time as well. They didn’t complain, throw things, or set fire to me – even a little bit!

2005-10-09T23:20:00.000+01:00

Self-determination and all that jazz

While attempting to fix my bicycle today I bumped into a visiting college friend who’s working for the UN Mission in Kosovo.

Odd to be discussing the exercise of treaty-making powers by the UN over a territory which may or may not ultimately be able to control its own foreign affairs while smeared in bicycle grease.

It was also an odd time to bump into him as Kofi Annan has just received a report from a special envoy on Kosovo, examining the options for its “final status” when the effective rule of the UN Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) ends.

It’s outright reintegration into Serbia following the 1998-9 conflict would seem highly unlikely, but the deliberate creation under UN auspices of a tiny fully independent State or a lesser “autonomous region” raises interesting questions.

By the end of term I’ll be explaining the law of self-determination to second-year law students. Which means I need to come to an understanding of it myself. Dammit.

Anyway, the political principle of self-determination is both a powerful tool for those living in territories subject to foreign rule and also a genie that’s rather hard to put back in the bottle - in that it seems to imply any ethnic group can claim its own country.

As a legal concept, the boundaries of self-determination a bit hard to establish. Basically, it meant former colonies – particularly in Africa – could claim self-determination within existing colonial boundaries (latin tag for this idea: “uti possidetis”). That is, if you accept the arbitrary territorial divisions of colonialism for the sake of future peace (a bargain ultimately backed by the Organisation for African Unity) the inhabitants of the territory can chose how they want to be governed.

In practice this always meant become a sovereign State. In this sense, self-determination was a right exercisable by the people who arbitrarily found themselves lumped into an ascertainable territory: it was not a right belonging to ethnic groups.

International law does not per se recognise the rights of ethnic/national groups to “self-determination”, but it does protect the rights of individuals to associate in cultural, linguistic or religious groups.

The reason for this is obvious: international law is made by States who are not keen to allow themselves to be dissolved into infinitely fracturing self-governing sub-groups. Individual rights to associate in groups within existing State structures they can cope with.

The collapse of the former Yugoslavia challenged all this to some extent. Here was an arbitrarily assembled federal State collapsing into its internal administrative regions, which did have strong ethnic majorities. “It’s self-determination Jim, but not as we know it.” The people of Quebec, Scotland or Western Australia have no right to unilaterally succeed from their Federal governments, so how did Yugoslavia succeed in ripping itself into smaller legal pieces?

Frankly, at present, I think what occurred was quite simply an exceptional case. As a matter of effectiveness (an important idea in international law), the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had ceased to function. The initial problem wasn’t civil war, it was a fundamental change in the underlying ideology of the State. Without a strong communism at the helm, old tensions could re-emerge, allowing central government to disintegrate.

In terms of controlling the impending chaos, the EC turned by analogy to the principle of “uti possidetis”, because it drew some lines on the ground that seemed to promise (rather illusorily as things turned out) stability and an alternative to conflict.

It’s still not a full answer, but it’s a start …

2005-10-05T20:08:00.000+01:00

Fresher's flu

Michaelmas is once more upon us: denoted by wide-eyed new arrivals in Cambridge, the turning of the leaves, the first autumnal mists and - inevitably - my first cold of the year.

This year I managed to catch it before Fresher's week, while sojourning in the peaks district. In some ways, a good week to be sick as there's little prospect of getting any work done in any event.

In some ways, bad: as it's the week to get to know the newbies and make 'em feel welcome.

I'm opting for the inhospitable strategy of a DVD ("Kill Bill, vol. 1") and early to bed ...

2005-10-01T09:49:00.000+01:00

So, where the hell have I been? (If you even noticed I was away … )

I’ve been remiss, certainly: but the last two weeks has been a non-stop travel extravaganza. I’ve been in Switzerland, Oxford, London and the Peaks District in just under two weeks.

Executive summary (it's a long post)

Switzerland was cold, wet and less full of Swiss people than one might expect (admittedly, I was in Geneva, which is 50% foreigners).

I was in Oxford for a Friday afternoon, and found it pleasant enough that I may have to go back for a weekend, despite it being “The Other Place” and having backed the King in the Civil War.

Then a quick weekend in London with Peter and Jasmine, my tirelessly hospitable hosts in the metropolis, before heading off for three days of hostelling in the hilly bit of England.

Geneva

Friday 16 September I set off for a weekend in Geneva, pretty much straight from presenting a paper at a conference in Cambridge. I was greeted at the airport by my host (an Australian buddy from the LLM who works in – wait for it – international law), and was swept off to drink wine in a funky little bar.

Not sure what I was expecting of Geneva. It felt like most of the place was erected out of concrete in the 1970s. Or maybe it was just that my host lived in the student quarter. Saturday we tootled round the Romanesque/Gothic confection of the Cathédral Saint Pierre, had lunch at a café and in the face of flaying wind went shopping. (Yes, I found bargains in Geneva). I then went to a fun party of ex-pat Anglophones in what would have seemed a big flat, had it not contained about 40 people.

Geneva is apparently dead on a Sunday, so we headed up to a wine festival in the little village of Roussin with some of my host’s Red Cross buddies. We drank wine, ate sausage and watched a gloriously amateurish parade of oompah-bands from villages in the district, followed by little floats principally stocked with sombre-faced Swiss kids in costume.

In a very me moment, I got lost on the way to the train station on Monday, and so wound up jumping in a cab (“l’aeroport, s’il vous plait!”) to prevent a repeat of my Edinburgh easyjet non-departure.

Oxford and London

Friday 23rd I had a chance to have a discussion with a senior law of the sea academic in Oxford.

Bizarrely, there is no train from Cambridge to Oxford (though there is, apparently, a line that was last used in the war). The options are to spend a freak-load of cash and make a two-hour train trip going into London transferring from Kings Cross to Paddington and heading out again; to spend even more and fly "Don Air"; or spending a fiver and getting an epic three-hour, stopping all villages, bus.

Poverty won over common sense, but at least it was a chance to catch up on some reading.

The interview went well, Oxford was pretty (when it stopped raining on me) and has some amazing vintage clothing stores, and I had an agreeable time drinking with friends of my sister’s.

Then off on a bus to London Friday night. Saturday was a whirlwind social round catching up with my Australian lawyer friends for lunch or drinks, before a late train home to Cambridge so I could catch a visiting former flatmate for breakfast on Sunday.

Peaks District

Then, earlier this week, I was away Monday through Wednesday at a youth hostel in Edale, in the peaks district, for outdoor activities with 100 new scholars from my funding body.

Predictably, I managed to take a seat on the bus leaving Cambridge directly in front of an Australian lawyer, who’d been to the same law school, worked at the same firm and was at the Sydney Federal Court while I was at the Fed in Melbourne.

Unlike the uber-adventure-activity mistress Marissa, I opted for the soft (if occasionally damp) elective activities such as raft-building, canoeing and hill-walking over high ropes and caving. My height of adventure was a 40 minute walk through darkened cow fields to the pub (not without its risks!) and badly bruising one finger near the tip when I got it caught in a three-strand chain bridge and then fell off arse-backwards into the woodchips during a “team-building” exercise.

Now I’m back in the ‘Bridge, panicking about my state of readiness for supervising undergraduates, and reflecting on the alarming fact that half the new Masters students in college appear to be 12.

Scariest recent moment ...

I held the gate at Wychfield open for a newly arriving couple. After some pleasantries, I introduced myself.

“I’m Doug,” I said, honestly enough.

“Do you have a blog called courting disaster?” asked he.

Ye gods.