“Accountability & Arab Spring” @ 7th International Humanitarian Law Dialogs

“The Long Hot Summer after the Arab Spring: Accountability and the Rule of Law” is the theme of this year’s International Humanitarian Law Dialogs, to be held August 25-27, 2013, at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. This will be the 7th year that international prosecutors and other experts gather at Chautauqua’s lovely lakeside Athenaeum Hotel to take stock of developments in international criminal law. It’s also the 3d year in a row that IntLawGrrls blog will host a lecture in honor of Katherine B. Fite, the State Department lawyer who helped Chief U.S. Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson with the drafting of the London Charter and other duties in preparation for the 1st postwar trial at Nuremberg. (My own 2011 Fite Lecture, which describes Fite’s career, is here.)

Delighted to announce that this year’s Fite Lecturer will be California-Davis Law Professor Karima Bennoune (above). I’ll have the honor of introducing Karima, an IntLawGrrls contributor whose new book, Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism, will be released on Monday, August 26, the same day as her IHL Dialogs lecture. (It’s available for Amazon preorder now. IntLawGrrls posts by and about Karima are here; the op-ed she published last week in The New York Times is here.)

Karima’s lecture is just one of many special events planned for this year’s Dialogs. Other highlights:

► Reflections by current prosecutors, featuring Fatou Bensouda (below; photo credit) of the International Criminal Court, Serge Brammertz of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Andrew T. Cayley of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Brenda J. Hollis of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Hassan Jallowof the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and Ekkehard Withopf of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Former prosecutors set to attend the Dialogs include 2 from the Special Court for Sierra Leone:David Crane, organizer of the Dialogs, and Stephen Rapp, since 2009 the Ambassador-at-Large and head of the Office of Global Justice, U.S. Department of State.

► Keynote address by Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid Al-Hussein, Jordan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations and former President of the ICC Assembly of States Parties.

► Year in review by Washington and Lee Law Professor Mark Drumbl.

► Panel on legal and policy issues related to the Arab Spring, moderated by Washington University Law Professor Leila Nadya Sadat, as well  as porch sessions on multiple aspects of the topic.

More information is at the website of the Robert H. Jackson Center, a primary sponsor,here. Other cosponsors include the American Society of International Law and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This book will be launched in the UK at the London School of Economics on October 23rd, 6.30 to 8pm.