WILLIAM PHILPOTT/AFP

The company formerly known as British Petroleum has finally acknowledged that it tried to cut corners on environmental safety in order to save money prior to the March, 2005, Texas refinery blast that killed 15 people and injured 500. BP successfully lobbied against stricter environmental controls in Texas, which would have forced BP to upgrade the exhaust system that ultimately exploded. Susan Moore, BP's lobbying chief, was even given a $1,000 bonus for saving BP $150 million in monitoring and equipment upgrades.

BP has been in hot water over the past few years for some questionable practices. In addition to facing accusations that it tried to manipulate propane prices in 2004, the company has also had to close down part of its Alaskan operations in March, 2006, after around 267,000 gallons of crude oil leaked out of one of its pipelines and prompted a safety investigation by U.S. regulators. Then six months later BP had to excavate a 50-year-old underground pipeline after 1,000 barrels of gasoil spilled in Long Beach, California. Despite these glaring errors, BP still managed to make a $22.3 billion profit last year. If BP is not intending to move "Beyond Petroleum" just yet, let's at least hope that it will stop cutting corners when it comes to environmental safety.

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As Blake noted in the Morning Brief, Angelina Jolie makes a strong case for Darfur justice in today's Washington Post. The victims want justice, she argues, and Khartoum doesn't. Those are very good reasons to celebrate the International Criminal Court's recent moves. But I think she also inadvertently highlights the danger of the judicial strategy for advocates of action in Darfur:

There has been a groundswell of public support for action. People may disagree on how to intervene -- airstrikes, sending troops, sanctions, divestment -- but we all should agree that the slaughter must be stopped and the perpetrators brought to justice.

This, in a nutshell, is the problem. The ICC becomes the lowest common denominator, and politicians averse to taking the hard steps can point to the prosecutions as evidence of progress.

Jolie also points out that the situation in Darfur has worsened considerably since 2004. The deterioration on the ground is evidence that, at least so far, the threat of prosecutions has not done the job that ICC enthusiasts hoped it would. And as the recent Bosnia genocide ruling demonstrates, the wheels of justice can move very slowly indeed.

The ICC is in action now, and it should aggressively push its case. But I think activists would be wise not to celebrate its small steps, lest they create the impression that something has actually been done.

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As noted in today's Morning Brief, The International Court of Justice, the U.N.'s highest legal body, has cleared Serbia of direct responsibility for what it ruled was a genocide during the 1990s war in the former Yugoslavia. However, the court did rule that Serbia violated international law by not preventing the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Muslim men and boys. The court, which rules on disputes between U.N. member states, has been deliberating on the case since May of last year. In a nuanced statement that took nearly two hours to read, British judge Rosalyn Higgins said the Srebrenica genocide "cannot be attributed to the respondent's (Serbia's) state organs."

Bosnia's case rested on the argument that Serbia incited ethnic hatred within Bosnia, armed ethnic Serbians, and actively participated in the war, which killed over 100,000 people between 1992 and 1995. Serbia has always denied the charge, insisting the war was an internal Bosnian conflict. Indeed, Serbia disputed the legality of the whole proceedings, as the U.N. had suspended Yugoslavia's membership at the time in question. Today, however, Judge Higgins ruled that Serbia had inherited Yugoslavia's "legal identity," and was thus bound by the Geneva Convention at the time of the massacre. It's doubtful that most Bosnian Muslims—who were looking for justice, not legalisms, and likely see an ethnic Serb as inseparable from the Serbian state—will be satisfied by this result.

Afghanistan's warlords and their followers are planning a major rally in Kabul tomorrow. Their cause?  Impunity. Of course, they wouldn't put it quite that way. The country's warlords will be demonstrating in favor of a bill guaranteeing amnesty for the mujahidin who fought against Soviet occupation.

In the gathering, the people will show their support for the jihadi leaders and for the amnesty bill," said Waqif Hakimi, spokesman for Jamyat Islami, one of the Islamist factions involved in the country's 1992-1996 civil war. "It will be huge. I think 50,000 people will attend."

SHAH MARAI/AFP

Afghanistan's warlords have become unsettled as international human rights groups push for prosecutions of the worst crimes committed during the country's long and bloody civil war. An amnesty bill has gotten the parliament's support, but now needs President Hamid Karzai's blessing.

It's not clear that he'll give it. The warlords now like to pretend that they were all fighting the good fight against the Soviet infidels (and some were), but many committed heinous atrocities against ordinary Afghans. Still, the amnesty issue puts Karzai—and the United States—in a tough spot. Battling the Taliban resurgence is the immediate priority, so delving into twenty years of atrocities would be damned inconvenient. Karzai's already unenviable job just got a little bit harder.

Earlier today, Blake wrestled with the question of whether an attack on Iran would be legal under United States law. But what about under international law? After all, the vagaries of the War Powers Act and Congressional resolutions are a sideshow from the perspective of international lawyers. What really matters is whether a U.S. attack would violate the U.N. Charter's prohibition on the use of force. There are two main roads around that prohibition: the U.N. Security Council and a claim of self-defense (Article 51 of the Charter preserves the "inherent right" of self-defense).

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The Security Council, of course, can bestow legality on just about whatever it pleases. If it says that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to international peace and authorizes force, the bombs can lawfully fall. But in today's political climate, that prospect appears remote.  China, Russia, and France show no signs of being ready to authorize force, and they have carefully steered existing resolutions away from that dangerous ground. Unlike with Iraq, there's no web of pre-existing Security Council resolutions authorizing force against Iran. Remember: Creative State Department and British Foreign Office lawyers argued that the current Iraq war was lawful because Iraq never complied with the Council's demands on disarmament, thus activating the previous authorization of force. (I always thought it was a strained argument, but at least  it was—in lawyer's parlance—"colorable.")

That leaves self-defense. The use and abuse of the legitimate doctrine of preemptive self-defense has been well documented. In light of Iraq, the United States would have a very hard time making such a claim stick. But Israel, interestingly, has a stronger case (what with Iran's military support for Hezbollah and the threats to wipe Israel off the face of the map). Could the United States legitimately piggyback on Israel's claim to preemptive self defense—making it collective preemptive self defense? I'm going to do some digging on what legal scholars think about that question and will report back.

Yesterday, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, FP's parent organization, launched its new vision for a global think tank centered in Washington, but with local offices in Moscow, Beijing, Beirut, and (soon) Brussels. The difference between a think tank that deals with international issues—those are a dime a dozen in this town—and a think tank that is itself international may sound like a fine distinction at first. But being based locally and working in the language is key to understanding other countries as they see themselves. With a dangerous political situation and the world's view of United States foreign policy lower than ever, it's vital that high-quality dialogue flow between places like Beijing and Washington. Carnegie's new global vision will help that tremendously.

But there are broader changes afoot that cross other boundaries. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, spoke about how technology is transforming the world (and simultaneously being transformed by it) in yesterday's riveting keynote address at Carnegie's launch event for the new vision.

One particularly intriguing question Schmidt asked was, What happens when the next billion Internet users go online? What are the implications for freedom of speech?

One billion is a lot of people. How will they communicate with each other?

Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland popped up to ask an interesting question: Are intellectual property rights a thing of the past in the Internet age? Schmidt responded by explaining how "intellectual property rights are fundamental to how we operate." Google Books, for instance, is raising all kinds of new and interesting questions about intellectual property.  

To another questioner worried about how dictatorships or other forces could seize control of the Web, Schmidt was reassuring. Kind of: 

I'm not as worried about it as you might be, because I understand how difficult it is to go in and impose your bias on a single node in the Internet .... You have to be able to shut down the borders .... Anyone who can do that on the Internet is quite dangerous .... The good news about the Internet is it's structured to make that extremely difficult .... Unless you're able to get control of all of the interconnection points, which is essentially impossible in most, at least, democratic countries, it's very very difficult to see how the kind of manipulation you're describing would occur."

Check out his response for yourself: 

Don't get me wrong. I think Wikipedia can be a great resource for fast information, like background on the Karbala shrine in Iraq or the name of Qaddafi's son that you can't remember. But when we check facts at FP, we deliberately exclude the community-built encyclopedia. There's just too much room for error there, and we've all found inaccuracies at one point or another—some major and some minor, but enough to leave Wikipedia off the list of reliable first sources.

Which is why I'm slightly mortified that U.S. courts are using Wikipedia articles as the basis for decisions. The NYT did a simple search recently and uncovered more than 100 judicial rulings in the past few years that rely on Wikipedia, including more than a dozen in U.S. courts of appeal (the last step before the Supreme Court). The facts gleaned from Wikipedia range from the definition of "beverage," to the official language of the Republic of Guinea, to DHS threat levels (that last one in a case about illegal searches of anti-war protesters).

But the mere fact that Wikipedia can be unstable and continually edited (admittedly with an attribution trail, but a complicated one that's susceptible to manipulation) makes it terribly vulnerable to error. It just shouldn't be used in official decisions, particularly because, as legal scholar Cass Sunstein suggested to the NYT, articles could be deliberately edited in order to influence the outcome of cases. I'm all for the courts embracing the Information Age, and I've always believed that the Constitution is a living document. But Wikipedia is just a little too dynamic for the likes of Lady Justice.  

The lively and ongoing debate at Opinio Juris on the legal aspects of the "war on terror" is getting a whole lot livelier now that John B. Bellinger III, Condi Rice's top legal advisor, has entered the ring with a series of lengthy posts defending the administration's conduct. In response to the routine criticisms lobbed at the administration for its seemingly indefinite detention of suspected terrorists, Bellinger argues that so long as we are engaged in distinct, parallel wars with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, detaining "enemy combatants" is appropriate. This raises the obvious question: When do these wars end? The responding bloggers, including the venerable David Sloss and Eric Posner, are grilling Bellinger on this question, judicial review of the detentions, his own role, and related legal issues in the war on terror. The entire debate, a rare instance of the Bush administration engaging its critics seriously and at length, is not to be missed.

(Thanks to Passport reader Peter J. Spiro for sending this in)

Saddam Hussein is dead and buried, and the charges against him for the murder of as many as 180,000 Iraqi Kurds have been dropped. Nevertheless, the former dictator held center stage at yesterday's court proceedings for the remaining defendants in the Anfal case. John F. Burns reports for the NYT on how recordings played of Saddam coldly advocating the use of chemical weapons on Kurdish villages prove that the world just said goodbye to a brutal despot.

On one recording, Mr. Hussein presses the merits of chemical weapons on Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, his vice-president, and now, the Americans believe, the fugitive leader of the Sunni insurgency that has tied down thousands of American troops. Mr. Douri, a notorious hard-liner, asks whether chemical attacks will be effective against civilian populations, and suggests that they might stir an international outcry.

"Yes, they're very effective if people don't wear masks," Mr. Hussein replies.

"You mean they will kill thousands?" Mr. Douri asks.

"Yes, they will kill thousands," Mr. Hussein says. [...]

Mr. Hussein sounds matter of fact as he describes what chemical weapons will do. "They will prevent people eating and drinking the local water, and they won’t be able to sleep in their beds," he says. "They will force people to leave their homes and make them uninhabitable until they have been decontaminated." [...]

But it was Mr. Hussein's chilling discussion of the power of chemical weapons against civilians that brought prosecutors and judges to the verge of tears, and seemed to shock the remaining defendants. One of the recordings featured an unidentified military officer telling Mr. Hussein that a plan was under development for having Soviet-built aircraft carry containers, packed with up to 50 napalm bombs each, which would be rolled out of the cargo deck and dropped on Kurdish towns.

"Yes, in areas where you have concentrated populations, that would be useful," Mr. Hussein replies.

The New York Times tells the astonishing tale of Kim Sung Hee, a North Korean refugee who gets married, has a baby, defects to China without her child, meets another man, can't marry him because she's an illegal alien, lives in constant fear of deportation, has another baby, flees to Vietnam with her second child, wins asylum in South Korea, lands a job and decides she wants to marry the Chinese man, but can't get a divorce from her North Korean husband in South Korean courts.

South Korean divorce law is ill-equipped to cope with situations like that of Kim Sung Hee. The reason? "A thicket of legal riddles," says the Times:

First, should South Korea even recognize a marriage sealed in North Korea, given that the South's Constitution calls the North part of its territory, and that such marriages are typically never registered in the South? With spouses on opposing sides of the border, which court should have jurisdiction? How can a spouse in North Korea defend his or her interests in a South Korean court?

Win McNamee/Getty Images

William, we hardly knew ye:

The FBI's file on former Chief Justice William Rehnquist - made public more than a year after his death - indicates the Nixon and Reagan administrations enlisted its help in blunting criticism of him during confirmation hearings.

The file also offers insight into the hallucinations and other symptoms of withdrawal that Rehnquist suffered when he was taken off a prescription painkiller in 1981. A doctor was cited as saying that Rehnquist, an associate justice of the Supreme Court at the time, tried to escape the hospital in his pajamas and imagined that the CIA was plotting against him.

GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/Getty Images

The San people of Botswana have won a landmark case today in a battle over their land in the Kalahari desert. Also known as the Bushmen, the San were forced to leave the land that their ancestors had inhabited for 20,000 years in order to make way for Botswana's wildlife and tourism industry, as well as lucrative diamond mining (including operations by De Beers, which has denied such claims). The Guardian takes the government line:

The government insists the Bushmen have changed their lifestyle so much that they no longer belong in the Kalahari reserve, an animal sanctuary the size of Belgium, and are affecting conservation efforts. They are better off in settlements, where they have access to clinics and schools, it says, adding that diamond mining has nothing to do with the decision. The government complains that the Bushmen's foreign supporters, including South African anti-apartheid hero, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and British actors Julie Christie and Colin Firth, are romanticising a hunter-gatherer lifestyle which no longer exists.

Advocacy group Survival International, by contrast, hailed the legal ruling in favor of the Bushmen as a "victory for indigenous peoples everywhere in Africa."

Every day, journalists around the world risk their lives in the pursuit of truth. Their harrowing experiences go largely unrecognized, but the effects of their work are immense - from giving a voice to those often unheard to defending the freedom of expression. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) recently honored the recipients of its annual International Press Freedom Awards, distinguishing selected international journalists who continue their work despite continued attacks, imprisonment, and harassment. This week, FP caught up with the three awardees, Colombian photojournalist Jésus Abad Colorado, Yemeni editor Jamal Amer, and Gambian journalist Madi Ceesay to learn more about their work in unfree societies.

The Washington Post's Nora Boustany describes the changed atmosphere in Washington regarding the International Criminal Court.

Now, as the court prepares to begin public hearings on its first case, the debate among senior U.S. military officials seems to be shifting away from staunch opposition, and a fresh assessment of the court seems to be underway. The new attitude has been prompted in part by the court's record since it began operations three years ago; Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, an Argentine, has dismissed hundreds of petitions for cases against the United States.

Iraq and Afghanistan have provided the ICC a quick opportunity to dispel the Pentagon's worst fears, and the court has seized the chance to show that it's after janjaweed - not GIs. With American hostility muted, the court now needs to catch and try those it has indicted. Appearing harmless to the superpower was an important challenge; inspiring fear among its targets is the next one.