Couldn’t We Just Trade Presidents? Gail Collins JULY 14, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/opinion/couldnt-we-just-trade-presidents.html?emc=edit_th_20170715&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=59914923

Couldn’t We Just Trade Presidents?

Gail Collins JULY 14, 2017

Why can’t Emmanuel Macron be our president?

American citizens watching Donald Trump’s visit to Paris must have wondered how we got the wrong guy. Macron seemed so smart, so charming. The fact that he didn’t father any children would not normally be a big selling point, but right now we are yearning for a president with no offspring.

Speaking of which, the Paris journey was dogged by questions about that meeting Donald Trump Jr. took during the presidential campaign. The one at Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who was advertised as the bearer of “information that would incriminate Hillary.”

Every day the meeting guest list grows larger. First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner was there. Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign manager, was there. Rob Goldstone, the British P.R. guy who likes to post pictures of himself in funny hats was there — representing a Russian pop singer whose dad is besties with Vladimir Putin.

Latest addition: Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet military officer who’s currently a lobbyist in Washington. Akhmetshin is rather well known in our nation’s capital, where he was recently mentioned by the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in a letter complaining about people who register as lobbyists when they really ought to be registering as foreign agents.

And Akhmetshin might have brought somebody else along. Possibly an interpreter. Or something. This information came from Donald Trump Jr.’s lawyer, who is not to be confused with Jared Kushner’s lawyer or President Trump’s lawyer.

Pop Quiz: Who else do you think might have been present for that Trump Tower meeting?

A) Ivanka

B) Tiffany

C) Ryan Seacrest

D) Boris and Natasha

Donald Trump was not at the meeting. Didn’t even know about it. Until later. Even then only barely. Lately, when he’s defending his son, Trump has taken to using terms that suggest Junior was accused of cheating on a Boy Scout swim test. Talking with reporters on his flight to Paris, Trump called his eldest “a good boy. He’s a good kid.” This was, as many people observed, while he was on his way to a meeting with the president of France, who is, at 39, exactly the same age as Donald Trump Jr.

On that plane ride, the president also took a question about whether he was really serious about building a Mexican wall with solar panels on top. The answer is, totally. Also, the wall is going to be transparent.

You heard me. This administration is very committed to transparency in everything from releasing Junior’s emails 10 minutes before The New York Times was going to publish them to the border barrier.

“You have to be able to see through it,” the president of the United States explained, because otherwise “when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff. It’s over.”

Once he was back on the ground, Trump had a great time in Paris. Macron pulled out all the stops. Dinner at the Eiffel Tower. Big parade with lots of guns and airplanes. Although the French were celebrating Bastille Day, they added in the 100th anniversary of American troops’ entry into World War I. So you got the impression everything was really all about Trump, which is the best way to our president’s heart.

Trump was so touched he grabbed Macron in a handshake that evolved through so many expressions of affection it could have been featured on a dating site. He also attempted to compliment Macron’s glamorous 64-year-old wife by saying, “You’re in such good shape.”

We should note here that Melania Trump did fine. The Parisian press praised her wardrobe. Unlike her husband, she didn’t say anything weird. Nobody accused her of having sinister meetings with Russians. Give the woman some credit.

Macron was such a successful host that Trump seemed to develop second thoughts on the global warming thing. “And yeah, I mean, something could happen with respect to the Paris Accord. … And if it happens, that’ll be wonderful. …” Trump also took back his previous blasts at Paris, a city he’d claimed wasn’t safe because of the terrorists they’d let come in.

“You know what, it’s going to be just fine, because you have a great president,” he said. The sun rises and sets, and then a new reality is born.

The matter of Junior and the Russian meeting did come up during a brief press conference Trump and Macron held. (Trump, who was supposed to call on two American journalists, called on one American and one Chinese TV reporter.) “I will not interfere in U.S. domestic policy,” said Macron. Trump, who liked that answer a lot, said his son was “a great young man” who did something “a lot of people would do.”

It’s beginning to sound like a lot of people did do it. Of course, they were all either Russians and their associates or top members of the Trump inner circle. If only they’d met in a transparent room.

Accused Somali pirates on trial in France for 2009 hijacking

Accused Somali pirates on trial in France for 2009 hijacking

Monday, October 14, 2013   Peter Snyder at 11:07 AM ET

http://jurist.org/paperchase/2013/10/accused-somali-pirates-on-trial-in-france-for-2009-hijacking.php

[JURIST] Three Somali pirates accused of hijacking a private yacht off the coast of Somalia in 2009 went on trial in France Monday. The situation garnered heavy media coverage after French special services attempted to rescue [Telegraph report] the three french nationals being held captive on the sailboat on April 10, 2009, four days after they were taken hostage. The operation led to the death of the boat's captain, Florent Lemacon, and the freeing of his wife and son. The three pirates now between the ages of 27 and 31 have been held in French custody [AFP report] since the incident four years ago.

A number of countries around the world have taken actions in the attempt to solve the problem of maritime piracy [JURIST news archive]. In August a jury in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia [official website] convicted [JURIST report] three Somali men of hijacking a boat and killing four Americans in 2011 off the coast of Somalia. In February the Abu Dhabi Federal Appeal Court upheld the sentences [JURIST report] of 10 Somali pirates convicted of highjacking a UAE-owned bulk-carrier ship in April 2011. In October 2012 the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court of Hamburg [official website, in German] issued sentences [JURIST report] for 10 Somalis who were involved in the hijacking the German freighter MS Taipan off the coast of Somalia two years ago.

Analysis: Mali - one African war France could not avoid

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/13/us-mali-rebels-france-idUSBRE90C09020130113

Analysis: Mali - one African war France could not avoid

By Mark John and John Irish   PARIS | Sun Jan 13, 2013 

(Reuters) - Just as its leaders were defining a new "hands-off" strategy for Africa, France has been thrust onto the front line of one of the continent's riskiest battlefields deep in the desert of Mali.

President Francois Hollande's backing of air strikes to halt Islamist rebels advancing on the capital Bamako raises the threat level for eight French hostages held by al Qaeda allies in the Sahara and for the 30,000 French expatriates living in neighboring, mostly Muslim states.

It could also trigger an attack on French soil. But, in what could be the biggest foreign policy decision of his presidency, Hollande bet that inaction bore a greater peril of producing a jihadist state like Afghanistan under the Taliban.

"We must stop the rebels' offensive, otherwise the whole of Mali will fall into their hands - creating a threat for Africa and even for Europe," his foreign minister Laurent Fabius told reporters to justify backing Mali's dilapidated national army.

For months, military planners in Paris had been working on discreet and limited support for an African-led effort due later this year to try and drive Islamists out of France's ex-colony.

That scenario was swiftly overtaken on Thursday as rebels captured the central town of Konna that is a gateway towards Bamako 600 km (375 miles) further south.

With Mali's army impotent, Hollande ordered the first military strikes of his career. Now France has deployed 550 troops, C-160 transport aircraft, attack helicopters and has Rafale jets on standby the question is: where does it go from here?

HOLLANDE HAS WIDE BACKING - FOR NOW

The intervention came weeks after Paris conspicuously failed to rescue the incumbent leader in Central African Republic, another ex-colony, leaving President Francois Bozize no alternative but to accept a power-sharing pact with insurgents threatening to take over his mineral-rich state.

The Bozize snub was a sign that Hollande's government was banging another nail in the coffin of "Francafrique", the decades-old system under which Paris propped up African leaders aligned to French business interests.

Francafrique for years helped dictate the Africa strategies of French companies in the mining and energy sectors such as the oil giant Elf Aquitaine that became Total SA in 2003. Total's chief executive was quoted last year as saying he believed Francafrique was dead.

Hollande's government stresses that by entering Mali, France is not falling back into old habits.

Its presence is legitimized by U.N. resolutions mandating foreign intervention to support Mali forces and approval by the same African leaders irked in 2011 when France and Britain ordered NATO air strikes in Libya to oust Muammar Gaddafi.

The United States and Britain have also signaled backing, and even opposition French conservatives mostly say Hollande did the right thing. Shocking reports of public amputations in rebel-held northern Mali as tough shariah Islamic law is imposed will persuade many French voters the intervention was just.

But events on the ground could change that quickly.

While the Mali Islamists are a rag-tag army, they managed to recoup many of the arms that spilled out of Libya during its war and can inflict real damage including the downing of a French helicopter on the first day of strikes.

By going to help the Malian army, Hollande defied threats by the rebels' allies, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), to kill the French hostages taken across the Sahara in past years.

As the failure of a French commando bid late last week to free a secret agent held in Somalia since 2009 shows, it will be very hard for him now to guarantee their safety.

"With this (Mali) intervention, the French president has shown he did not want to be taken hostage himself by the issue of the French hostages held by AQIM. That is an act of political courage," said Mathieu Pellerin, head of the Paris-based Centre of Strategic Intelligence on the African Continent (CISCA).

Hollande said he believed the secret agent had been killed during the abortive raid, an assertion which the Somalian al Shabaab insurgents deny.

REPRISALS RISK

With some of the rebel Malian fighters living side by side with their families, the further risk is of collateral damage that would drain domestic and foreign support for the action.

"If we jump in then we could have horrific images of children, women killed," said one French diplomatic source speaking before last week's events, noting how civilian deaths caused by NATO operations in Afghanistan damaged public support for the Western mission to dislodge Taliban Islamists there.

Fears will also grow of reprisals on the large expatriate French communities in neighboring Muslim countries such as Burkina Faso, Niger and Senegal.

"There are consequences, not only for French hostages, but also for all French citizens wherever they find themselves in the Muslim world," Sanda Ould Boumama, of the Malian insurgent group Ansar Dine, warned on Saturday.

But the real political game-changer for Hollande is the threat of an attack on French soil.

France is no stranger to such strikes, with eight killed during a wave of bombings of the Paris Metro in 1995 by Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (GIA), a guerrilla Islamist movement from which AQIM traces some of its lineage.

Home to Europe's largest Muslim population of some five million, France is acutely aware of the risk of radicalization after an al Qaeda-inspired gunman last March went on a killing spree in the southern city of Toulouse, killing seven.

Underlining that he takes the threat of attack seriously, Hollande on Saturday announced he was stepping up security measures on French transport and in public places.

BAPTISM OF FIRE

For now, France said its aim is not to begin an operation to take Mali's north back out of rebel hands. Hollande has stressed its exclusive goal is to prepare for a subsequent intervention to be led not by Paris but by the West African ECOWAS bloc.

French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said on Sunday France was pursuing strikes on rebel targets and residents said its aircraft had even bombed the northern rebel stronghold Gao.

But Mark Schroeder, Africa-watcher for U.S.-based risk and security consultancy Stratfor, expected French troops largely to focus on holding the line in central Mali in coming weeks and wait for the operation to take on a more international feel.

"Behind that line, the European Union military training mission will come in and African forces will start to arrive," he said of troops from neighbors including Niger due to arrive from Monday to build a total force around 3,300 strong.

While that could help France wind down its exposure, CISCA's Pellerin said that would still depend crucially on the African-led coalition gaining the necessary size and strength to lead the fight to push back the rebels - not a given at this stage.

A rare dissenting voice, former foreign minister Dominique de Villepin - who led world opposition to the U.S.-led Iraq war in 2003 - warned France could get sucked into a conflict where military victory was hollow without political conciliation.

"It is time to break with a decade of lost wars," he said of wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya which he argued merely created the grounds for future conflicts.

For Hollande, whose poll ratings are at record lows because of his hesitant leadership and failure to cut unemployment, Mali could emerge as his political crucible.

It was already diverting attention away from a mass march on Sunday in protest at his plans to legalize gay marriages, and meant that a late-night Friday deal between trade unions and employers on reforming the labor market went little noticed.

"This is not just any old baptism of fire," said Bruno Tertrais, head of research at Paris's Foundation for Strategic Research. "This is a baptism of fire in his very role as chief of the armed forces."

the implication of Hollande's victory in France for euro zone and the U.S.

http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-05-11/friday-news-roundup-international/transcript  

The Diane Rehm Show , May 11, 2012

MS. DIANE REHM

Thanks for joining us. I'm Diane Rehm. Twin suicide bombings in Syria kill at least 55 and injure hundreds. Voters in France and Greece oust incumbent leaders and Russia clamps down on protests of Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency. Joining me to talk about the week's top international stories on the Friday News Roundup, David Sanger of The New York Times, Susan Glass of Foreign Policy magazine and Matt Frei of the UK's Channel 4 News

REHM

Sarkozy .. had supported the compact to increase fiscal discipline in the euro zone. Now you've got this conflict in outward thinking on the part of Angela Merkel in Germany and Francois Hollande.

SANGER

it was only a matter of time before the question of whether austerity was the right way to go became a ballot box issue. And last week was the time. It was the time in France and it was really the time in Greece, as we'll get to in a moment.

But in the end, Hollande's victory, which was narrow but decisive, indicated that the French people were quite worried about the direction Sarkozy was going in the austerity movement and that he was doing it in conjunction with Germany.

And so now the question is, what happens if France splits away from the approach that Angela Merkel is taking for Germany. (DO- austerity measure)  And of course, Germany is the one who's bankrolling all of this -- much of this bailout.

REHM

Harvard economist Ken Rogoff does not see the election of Hollande as a rejection of austerity so much as rejection of Germany's influence in the euro zone and its leading role in the drive toward austerity in the region.

FREI

I think it's a little bit of both.  .. what's essentially happened in Europe is that the Germans 60 years after the Second World War were dictating economic terms to the rest of the continent, whereby Greeks and to some extent Spaniards and Italians started to feel like there were colonies within the euro zone.  Politically, this is just not viable.  As David said, we saw the explosion at the ballot box.

If you look at unemployment rates, in Spain, 50 percent amongst young people, in Italy, 36 percent, in Greece, 52 percent. All the extremist parties have benefited whether on the right or the left from the elections that we saw in the last week. Now this is just something that cannot continue.

Although it was said in Germany beforehand that Francois Hollande would be a disaster for the austerity package that Germany has come up with, .. Angela Merkel is beginning to flirt with Francois Hollande in a way that she would never have imagined because although Germany has the financial clout it doesn't have the political clout or conviction...

It doesn't because it needs France together. The Germans don't like doing stuff by themselves for obvious reasons.  The ghosts of history are knocking on the door. 

They want to have the cover of France. They need to do it together with the French.  The German position has weakened.

If the Greeks are caught between austerity and their own people  …  the German electorate doesn't like the idea of anyone in Germany bankrolling Greek debt.

GLASSER

Merkel, as a politician, is perhaps in more trouble than any of the newly elected leaders in France

But it didn't just start this week with the elections in Greece and France. What I'm struck by is actually Europe has been in a period of extraordinary political turmoil following and related to this economic turmoil ..  The government just fell a few weeks ago in the Netherlands.

FREI

Eight governments in one year.

REHM

But, you know, what does this mean for the United States and austerity here?

GLASSER

The bottom line is that the EU is the largest trading partner of the United States. ..  and it is the bedrock upon which all of our international security arrangements are built

SANGER

President Obama .. did not do what President Clinton did during the Asian crisis in 1998 where the U.S. was the central player in going in to do the rescues and then brought the IMF in.  

In this case, President Obama said this is first and foremost the euro zone's problem. If you need outside assistance you do it through the IMF and the United States will cooperate. And did in fact increase its contributions to the IMF but kept this at some remove.

And he did this as part of a broader strategy of forcing allies who have a more direct interest in the outcome of a particular problem to go confront that rather than go deal with the United States. You saw it in Libya when he wanted NATO and the Arab League to take a -- I could go on with many other examples.

So now the question comes, if they didn't pour enough money in soon enough to stem the (Euro zone) problem early on and let the austerity packages simmer and result in these kind of political backlashes, ..  are we going to say that the right way to go was the way we handled the Asian crisis.. ?

FREI

But there's a problem here as well, .. to get congress to approve sending large amounts of money ..  zero chance. (DO- deficit)

Secondly, the Asian crisis .. was a much easier thing to handle because you were dealing with fewer countries and there were just fewer elections around.  there was not a common currency.  So, the euro crisis .. is so utterly fiendish and complicated.

And it comes back to the ultimate problem, .. when you're asking different economies and different populations with different electorates and governments to basically pull together on the same project, unless you have a genuine union like the USA,  it's not going to happen.

SANGER

in France people were choosing between two governments. In Greece this was basically a referendum on are we going to continue on the austerity? Overwhelmingly the answer was no, some people reaching for a far right group, some reaching for a far left group. The result is that right now they have no government.

in the next election, they're suddenly going to have to choose about what it is they want to do. All this election last week was about what they didn't want to do.

Well, there is one option that is going to be heavily debated in Greece right now, and that option is to leave the Euro, to go back to the drachma, the old Greek currency, and not have to live underneath the restrictions that the rest of the Eurozone puts on Greece.

it gets Germany and France and everybody else out of their business. The difficulty is, somebody has to lend them money to pay back their debts, or they go into a complete, less-managed bankruptcy.

FREI

Greece is huge problem, but it's not the only problem,

French banks, especially Credit Agricole, which is one of the largest banks in France, is massively overextended in the Greek economy.  So that's where you see a fuse going from Greece straight into the French financial sector. Spanish banks are on the brink as well. Italy is a crisis again waiting to erupt. So it's a little bit like one of those south California wildfires. You put it out in one area, and it starts in another area.

Defuse the lexicon of slaughter - DAVID SCHEFFER

Defuse the lexicon of slaughter

IHT, February 24, 2012 Friday, DAVID SCHEFFER

=======================

Conclusion –

politicians should use the term “genocide” only when historians and jurists have determined. It is the responsibility of historians to establish the facts of distant events and of jurists to determine whether these were a genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, human rights abuse, political repression or other crimes against civil or political rights

Politicians would be better off using the phrase “atrocity crimes” – a term with no pre-existing connotations or legal criteria – to describe any combination of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes

==================================

Legislators play a dangerous game using the word ''genocide.'' In trying to appease millions of victims, they needlessly pit nations against one another. They should leave it to others to sift through the evidence and determine what killings occurred when and which ones amount to what crimes. Political judgments distort the search for truth and for justice. reason 1

Millions of people live with the memories that their ancestors were slaughtered out of prejudice. They demand that the story of their people's past be confirmed for posterity and that the perpetrators be condemned. But judging such facts, especially many years, perhaps even centuries, after they occurred, requires the discipline of historians and, if surviving suspects can be prosecuted, of jurists.

Some nations have outlawed Holocaust denial to avoid stoking the violence bred by anti-Semitism. Such intentions may be sound, but too often the results are problematic. Legislators and governments have variously decreed or denied that given mass atrocities were genocides in order to satisfy certain interest groups or national agendas.

example of reason 1

France and Turkey are now at loggerheads, for example, over how to characterize the deaths of some 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians nearly a century ago and whether to criminalize any refusal to call those atrocities a genocide. The French Parliament says ''genocide'' and wants to criminalize its denial; Turkey rejects the term and prosecutes those who use it. The Turkish prime minister has threatened sanctions against France and countered that France committed a genocide of its own in Algeria between 1830 and 1962.

Mass atrocities were indeed committed against the Armenians, but deciding to call them a ''genocide'' - or refusing to - is a dangerously divisive political game. It heightens tensions between countries and sows confusion about what really happened.  reason 1

Politicians should use the term ''genocide'' only when historians and jurists have determined, based on evidence and analysis, that a genocide - a specific crime defined according to narrow factual and legal criteria - has indeed occurred. It is the responsibility of historians to establish the facts of distant events and of jurists to determine whether these were a genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, human rights abuses, political repression or other crimes against civil or political rights.

Reason 2

Using the word ''genocide'' loosely can be tragically ineffective or self-defeating. It can intimidate powerful nations from reacting quickly enough to prevent further atrocities.

Example of reason 2

The United Nations and key Western governments failed to act in Rwanda and the Balkans in the early 1990s partly because their policy makers were searching for terminological certainty about the nature of the killings. The false notion arose that invoking ''genocide'' would require immediate military intervention. (The 1948 Genocide Convention does not demand this; the requirement that parties to the treaty ''prevent'' genocide can take military, political, diplomatic or economic forms.) And while the politicians pondered, thousands of civilians continued to die.

When in 2004 Secretary of State Colin Powell declared the killings in Darfur a genocide, he wasn't committing to United States to send the 82nd Airborne into western Sudan. He was simply trying to prod the U.S. government to take some action, ideally with others, to stop the atrocities. But others in Washington and several Western capitals froze at the use of the g-word.  (reaction to g-word)

Politicians would be better off using the phrase ''atrocity crimes'' - a term with no pre-existing connotations or legal criteria - to describe any combination of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes, leaving it to historians and jurists to determine, free of political influence, which atrocity crimes belong to which category. In the face of ongoing mass killings, this would allow policy makers to concentrate on what needs to be done to end a slaughter rather than debate how to define it. The Obama administration is rightly creating the Atrocities Prevention Board to free up decision-making from any confining lexicon.

France, as well as the United States and Israel - both of which are considering similar genocide legislation - could call what occurred to the Armenian people a century ago atrocity crimes. (Turkey might even tolerate that.) And Turkey could condemn what the Algerians suffered at the hands of the French as atrocity crimes.

If the United States, the European Union and the Arab League declared that the Syrian government was currently committing atrocity crimes against its own people, they would have an easier time getting the U.N. Security Council to refer Syria's leaders to the International Criminal Court for investigation, leaving it to the prosecutor to determine what crimes to list in an indictment. Rather than veto such a move, Russia and China might abstain from voting on it and give justice a chance.

By forgoing ''genocide,'' politicians would no doubt disappoint interest groups determined to use the label to describe the suffering inflicted on their ancestors. The Armenians, in particular, would find this compromise hard to accept. But their strongest case rests with the historians and the jurists now - not with the politicians whose loose indictments trigger the very tensions that can ignite prejudice among peoples and nations. Shifting to ''atrocity crimes'' in government speech, meanwhile, would focus the efforts of officials on getting more unified international responses to ongoing massacres.

NOTES: the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues from 1997 to 2001, is a law professor at Northwestern University. His new book is ''All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals.''

Amesys, alleged to be complicit in human rights violation in Libya

Amesys, a French subsidiary of the Bull Group

When Tripoli was liberated, on 29 August 2011, journalists from the Wall Street Journal entered the building where the Libyan regime monitored communications. They found manuals written in English carrying the logo of Amesys, a French subsidiary of the Bull Group.  In 2007 Amesys entered into an agreement with the government of Libya to make technology available for the purpose of intercepting communication, data processing and analysis.

Paris, 19 October 2011 – Today FIDH and LDH filed a criminal complaint, together with an application to join the proceedings as a civil party against persons unknown before the Court in Paris concerning the responsibility of the company Amesys, a subsidiary of Bull, in relation to acts of torture perpetrated in Libya.

This complaint concerns the provision, since 2007, of communication surveillance equipment to Gaddafi’s regime, intended to keep the Libyan population under surveillance.

This complaint, which singles out a company for being complicit in grave violations of human rights on the basis of extraterritorial jurisdiction, is considered within the framework of the struggle against impunity, at a time when a growing number of companies is being denounced for having provided similar systems to authoritarian regimes. 

2 tacks to combat piracy

Year's end finds 2 countries setting different courses to combat the recent spate of pirate attacks in the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia.

In the United States, just before Thanksgiving, a federal jury in Virginia returned convictions for piracy and other offenses against 4 Somali defendants. (credit for detail from 2010 courtroom sketch by Alba Bragoli/AP) The verdict came one month after the judge in the case,United States v. Hasan, sustained a charge brought under 18 U.S.C. § 1651. The statute provides, in language dating to 1819:

Whoever, on the high seas, commits the crime of piracy as defined by the law of nations, and is afterwards brought into or found in the United States, shall be imprisoned for life.

Yet in the same courthouse a few months earlier, a different federal judge, in the case of United States v. Said, had dismissed a piracy chargebrought against 6 other Somali men. Tripping the latter judge up was Congress' reference in § 1651 to "the law of nations."

The opposite rulings reflect uncertainties about whether an old legal framework presents the proper way to proceed against 21st C. pirates. It's a puzzle addressed in this discussion by our OJ colleagues, and in manyIntLawGrrls posts available here.

In the United States, the discrepancy next awaits consideration by the Virginia-based Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit.

France, meanwhile, has taken another tack.

France also has been involved in policing piracy in the Gulf of Aden.(credit for March 2010 of French naval vessel, with "Somali pirate skiffs" in foreground) France also has found that its old laws fell short -- and so it's opted for a legislative fix.

Shortly before Christmas, the Sénatvoted unanimously in favor of the Loi de lutte contre la piraterie et d'exercice des pouvoirs de police de l'Etat en mer -- a bill to ease the pursuit and punishment of pirates that the legislature's lower house already had approved.

Key components:

► An 1825 French antipiracy law having been abrogated in 2007, the newly adopted law reintroduces into the penal code the crime of piracy -- a crime may be pursued via universal jurisdiction. The new law applies to acts of piracy "within the meaning of" the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, "committed ... on the high seas," "in maritime spaces outside any state's jurisdiction," and "when international law permits, in a state's territorial waters." That Convention is an artifact of the law of nations to which France has been a state party since 1996, but to which, as posted, the United States does not belong.

► The new statute further establishes a legal regime for detaining suspects onboard French naval vessels while they are being transported to judicial authorities. These Mesures prises à l'encontre des personnes à bord des navires respond to a March 2010 judgment, Affaire Medvedyev et Autres c. France, in which the European Court of Human Rights held that France had violated the guarantee of liberty and security of person in Article 5 of Europe's human rights convention by its high-seas detention in 2002 of members of a ship's crew who were suspected of trafficking in drugs.

(Deep thanks for invaluable assistance with this post to University of California-Davis LL.M. student Johann Morri, on leave this year from his post as a French administrative law judge.)