Smoke gets in your eyes

Writing for Just Security, Prof. Rachel VanLandingham, President of the National Institute of Military Justice, sees the military justice provisions of the FY22 NDAA as a missed opportunity. There'll be tons of commentary as the dust settles and the air clears after the recent smoke-filled-room sausage-making. Comments most welcome here, but please use your real name.

Sen. Kirsten Gillbrand and allies discuss the developments here. Note in particular Sen. Dick Blumenthal's polite but pointed comments about closed SASC markups.

Bar Admissions

One other data point emerges from the latest annual report of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces (discussed here): the number of admissions to the court's bar jumped from 149 to 202 between the 2019 and 2020 Terms and is the highest it has been since the 2014 Term. The COVID-19 pandemic may explain the recent change. The decline in cases presumably also explains the anemic bar admission numbers in recent years. Over the court's history, 37,605 attorneys have been admitted to practice before it.

FY22 NDAA

The House Rules Committee website includes the NDAA for FY22 in its latest form. The Joint Explanatory Statement explains what the negotiators did with the competing House and Senate bills. The part describing the military justice provisions begins on page 84.

Senate Judiciary Committee Guantanamo Hearing

It's going on right now. Here's the link:

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/closing-guantanamo-ending-20-years-of-injustice

First Latin-American Data Base on Human Rights Standards

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) with the assistance of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation presented today the first data base (https://www.iuslat.com/#search-advanced/content_type:2/*), with open and free access, to the decisions of the Commission and Court of Human Rights, the result of a joint project that was commenced in 2019.

The repository of the jurisprudence of the human rights organs of the OAS on the platform IUSLAT of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation permits an intelligent and rapid search for the decisions and standards developed by the organs of the Inter-American system.  The platform also contains constitutional jurisprudence concerning human rights standards from national tribunals throughout Latin America.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights in recent years has failed routinely to translate its judgments into English for lack of funds, although some leading cases are now being translated. The new data base, although in Spanish, accepts the entry of terms in English, such as "military jurisdiction" and provides responses from cases that exist in English.  The jurisprudence of the Inter-American system on the issue of military jurisdiction is now easily accessible.

Given that the US and Canada are both member states of the OAS, it is curious that they are not dominant in the creation or support of this project.  Germany, as a party to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, understands the importance of a strong regional system for the protection of human rights in Europe and in other regions.