(HT: Freedom’s Challenge, Secretary Clinton Blog and @maafa

Susan Morgan

Fresh from my visit at Yahoo! this past Tuesday, I wanted to post on some more great Yahoo! news. From the Yahoo! Business and Human Rights Program Blog:

The Global Network Initiative (GNI) is pleased to announce the appointment of Susan Morgan as its first Executive Director. As Executive Director, Ms. Morgan will be responsible for continuing to make GNI a leading voice in defending and promoting freedom of expression and privacy in the information and communications technology industry worldwide. Ms. Morgan comes to GNI at a pivotal time and will be focused on advancing GNI’s goals, including increasing membership, encouraging collective action, overseeing the learning and accountability framework, and acting as a public advocate and spokesperson for GNI.

“Technology has the potential to dramatically increase access to information and protect personal privacy. However, increasing demands from governments to limit content, restrict freedom of expression and monitor users represent a worrying threat to human rights,” said Ms. Morgan.

“GNI can lead the way in helping companies make thoughtful and responsible decisions that protect the freedom of expression and privacy rights of hundreds of millions of Internet and communications technology users around the world,” Ms. Morgan said. “I am delighted to join GNI and look forward to building its global leadership role as we encourage more companies and their stakeholders to join us in this multi-stakeholder effort to protect freedom of expression and privacy worldwide.”

Ms. Morgan expects to begin her role at GNI in May of this year, joining from British Telecommunications (BT), where she was head of corporate responsibility (CR) strategy, policy and business planning.  She played a key role in BT’s approach to external reporting and corporate accountability.  She also led work on assessing corporate responsibility risk and opportunity.  Ms. Morgan has more than fifteen years of experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors.

Today, GNI also announces the formation of its Board of Directors. The GNI Board of Directors consists of eight representatives from companies, four from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), two from the academic community, two from investment firms, and an independent Chair.  All the NGO, academic and investor seats on the Board are filled, and five company seats remain open for companies that join GNI.

Finally, GNI has published on its website a Governance Charter that establishes a formal decision-making and accountability structure for GNI.  The Charter describes how GNI will be governed in order to ensure integrity, accountability and effectiveness.

The Global Network Initiative is a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics dedicated to protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector.

Many congrats to Ms. Morgan on the new position! For more information on the Global Network Initiative, check out their website.

(HT: Michael Samway)

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Michael Samway, Anthony Clark Arend, Ebele Okobi-Harris, and Michael Callahan

It was my great pleasure today to visit the Yahoo! Campus in Sunnyvale, California. Yahoo! has an extremely active Business and Human Rights Program that supports a wide-variety of specific initiatives. In 2007, Yahoo! made a very generous contribution to Georgetown University to establish the Yahoo! International Values, Communications, Technology, and Global Internet Fellowship Fund. This Fund supports the work of the Yahoo! Fellow in Residence and two Junior Yahoo! Fellows– who are students in the Master of Science in Foreign Service Program (MSFS). This year’s Yahoo! Fellow in Residence is the brilliant, Evgeny Morozov. In addition to his research, Evgeny is teaching an MSFS course this semester on The Internet and Democracy.

Many, many thanks to Michael Callahan, Executive Vice President, General Counsel and Secretary of Yahoo!, Michael Samway, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, and Ebele Okobi-Harris, Director, Business and Human Rights Program, for meeting with me today and showing me around the Yahoo! Campus. Michael Samway was a student of mine twenty-years ago, and it was great to see him again in Sunnyvale! We at Georgetown are looking forward to seeing the two Michaels and Ebele in April at a special Georgetown conference sponsored by the Yahoo! Fund and featuring Evegeny’s work!

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed-- Criminal or Combatant?

My wife Tracy and I are excited to be in San Francisco again! Tomorrow night I will be giving a talk for the Georgetown University Alumni Club of Northern California entitled “Terrorists: Criminals or Combatants?” I will post comments about the evening.

New Under Secretary of the Air Force, Erin Conaton

As numerous posts have noted, Erin Conaton’s nomination to be Under Secretary of the Air Force had been “on hold” for some time. Yesterday, the Senate finally confirmed her. The Air Force Times reports:

The Air Force has a No. 2 civilian leader for the first time since August 2007.

The Senate confirmed Erin Conaton as undersecretary of the Air Force on March 4 after months of political wrangling.

Jeff Sessions and Richard Shelby, the Republican senators from Alabama, had placed holds on her nomination because they were upset over the Air Force’s handling of the KC-X tanker competition, among other things. The holds were lifted without explanation.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing earlier that day, Sessions told Air Force Secretary Michael Donley that he was still upset about the tanker competition and that “this [was] not going to go away.”

Sessions spokeswoman Sarah Haley declined to comment on why the holds were lifted. Shelby’s office could not be reached for comment.

Conaton was nominated by President Obama on Nov. 10.

Many, many congrats to my friend Erin on her confirmation!  She will be a wonderful asset to the Air Force and exercise great leadership in her new position!

(HT: Doug Shaw)

Congress is flirting with “Buy America” again, “complaining that money is going to projects that are creating jobs in foreign countries.” They’re pointing to the “Buy America” provisions in the 2009 stimulus package, which call for American firms to be favored over foreign firms when making government purchases.

Back in ’09, President Obama correctly observed that favoring US companies over foreign ones could “trigger a trade war” and send a message to the world that “we’re just looking after ourselves.” Indeed, the Buy America provisions have provoked outrage from important trading partners across the globe.

Yet, President Obama’s gentle leadership on this issue is not enough. We need his bold and courageous style to explain in no uncertain terms why protectionism is wrong for the United States.

On March 18, 2008, then-candidate Barack Obama gave the most important speech on race in the United States since Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke in the 1960s. He addressed fears that people have of others who are different from them. He explained that he was running for president because “we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together.” The speech showed courage of leadership on a divisive issue, and it inspired many to vote for him.

These days, people are worried about the economy, and it is easy to let fears about people who are different – people of foreign countries – be our scapegoat.

Yet, let’s look back at other periods of stormy economy history. It is widely agreed that the world plunged deeper into the Great Depression of the 1930s because of insular “beggar-thy-neighbor” policies. Governments sought to bail out their own countries at the expense of their neighbors.

Now, as we live through times of economic woe, with crisis in country after country, isolationism is certainly tempting. We are seduced by ugly nationalism to deal with international problems, just as we have so many times faltered and turned to racism domestically. These poisonous fruits, however, can only spell further disaster.

So, while President Obama sometimes nudges in the right direction on this issue, his gentle prodding to tone down nationalist demands are simply insufficient.

We need bold global leadership from someone who understands the ways in which all people – from Kansas to Kenya, from Illinois to Indonesia, from Pennsylvania Avenue to Pakistan – are intimately connected. This is why we elected President Obama.

We need our President to forthrightly explain to the American people exactly why a Buy America approach is wrong:

We live in a globalized, multi-polar world.
Simply put, we cannot solve the financial challenges of our time unless we solve them together.

Well said! And I think this type of bold leadership could extend to other areas of international affairs– including our enhanced support for a more law-based approach to deal with terrorists.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

The Huffington Post is reporting today:

In a potential reversal, White House advisers are close to recommending that President Barack Obama opt for military tribunals for self-professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four of his alleged henchman, senior officials said.The review of where and how to hold a Sept. 11 trial is not over, so no recommendation is yet before the president and Obama has not made a determination of his own, officials said. The review is not likely to be finished this week.

Officials spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss private deliberations.

Attorney General Eric Holder decided in November to transfer Mohammed and the four other accused terrorists from the prison at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to New York City for civilian trials. That was initially supported by city officials, but was later opposed because of costs, security and logistical concerns.

When opposition ballooned further into Congress and an attempted Christmas airline bombing brought massive scrutiny to Obama’s terrorism policies, the administration said it would review Holder’s trial decision and consider all options for a new location.

In addition to local opposition to a trial, the administration faces pressure on its goal of closing Guantanamo on another front. Republicans in Congress have proposed barring prosecutions of terrorism defendants in federal courts or in reformed military commissions located in the United States.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., has proposed legislation that would prevent the Obama administration from putting Mohammed and other terrorists on trial in any American community. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., joined by about half the Senate’s Republicans and a few Democrats, has made a similar proposal.

Separate from the internal trial review, the White House is in still-ongoing negotiations with lawmakers over those proposals, including how to secure funding from Congress to hold terrorism trials and to close the Guantanamo prison and replace it with another facility in the United States.

The Obama administration views civilian trials for terrorists as an important demonstration of the U.S. commitment to rule of law. Officials also have cited the numerous terrorism trials already held successfully in U.S. criminal courts.

This would, I believe, be an unfortunate development. What message would such a reversal send to the rest of the world? That our criminal justice system is “too good” for these persons? It would have been better if the initial decision had been to op for military trials. But if the Administration now reverses, it makes the United States appear all the more to be seeking a forum most conducive to a conviction (even though, of course, military trials themselves will not guarantee such conviction.)

Over at The Monkey Cage, my friend and Georgetown colleague, Erik Voeten, posts:

I wrote the previous post on UN peacekeeping as this was something I used to track closely but haven’t followed in the past five years. I was struck by the numbers as I gathered some graphs for teaching the other day. Holger Schmidt, who knows much more about this topic than I do, wrote to point me to two interesting papers that offer a much more systematic analysis of recent trends. The first, a 2009 article (gated) in the Journal of Peace Research by Alex Bellamy and Paul Williams, shows that Western countries engage in quite a significant amount of peacekeeping but for various reasons prefer to do so outside the UN framework. The second, a preliminary working paper by Jim Lebovic presented at the 2010 ISA conference, shows how patterns of contributions have shifted markedly in the second wave of post Cold War UN peacekeeping. Abstracts [follow] . . . .

Alex J. Bellamy and Paul D. Williams The West and Contemporary Peace Operations Journal of Peace Research 2009 46: 39-57

In recent years, senior UN officials have raised concerns about the decline of Western contributions to UN peace operations. Although this is a worrying trend for supporters of the UN, it does not mean that the West is playing a smaller role in peace operations per se. Instead, the West has increased its contribution to `hybrid’ peace operations and missions that take place outside of the UN system. This article examines the West’s contribution to both UN and non-UN peace operations since the Brahimi Report and assesses whether its contribution has markedly changed and what impact any changes have had on international peace and security. It proceeds in three sections. The first provides a historical overview of the West’s ambivalent relationship with UN peace operations since 1948. The second analyses the West’s contribution to UN, hybrid and non-UN peace operations. The final section explores what Western policies mean for international peace and security by assessing their impact on the UN’s authority, the extent to which they save lives and their contribution to building stable peace. The article concludes that while in the short term the West’s willingness to participate in hybrid operations displays a commitment to finding pragmatic solutions to some difficult problems, over the longer term this approach may weaken the UN’s ability to maintain international peace and security.

Lebovic, James. “Passing the Burden: Contributions to UN Peace Operations in the Post-Cold War Era” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Theory vs. Policy? Connecting Scholars and Practitioners, New Orleans Hilton Riverside Hotel, The Loews New Orleans Hotel, New Orleans, LA, Feb 17, 2

This paper assesses the changing composition of personnel contributions to UN peace operations (UNPOs). It proceeds as follows. It examines statistical evidence to establish that participation in UN missions grew enormously in the post-Cold War period and that increased participation by less-wealthy (aid-receiving) countries accounts overwhelmingly for these trends. Next, it assesses realist and non-realist accounts for state involvement in UNPOs and a potential role for international institutions in these operations should their staffing depend on “aid-hungry” states that seek to exchange their labor for the benefits of UNPO participation. It then presents a research strategy that focuses on global aid distribution patterns to determine whether UNPO personnel contributions are increasingly driven by financial and development motives, specifies a model (and discusses its constituent variables), and then tests it on cross-sectional time-series data for the 1992-2008 period. The paper concludes that the second post-Cold War decade was a significant departure from the first: whereas the capabilities and political preferences of contributors accounted for change in their personnel contributions to UNPOs in the first post-Cold War decade, an aid imperative helped account for such change in the 2001-08 period.

QUESTION: (In Spanish.)
INTERPRETER: The journalist was just asking how the U.S. intends to negotiate to get the United Kingdom to sit at the table and address the Malvinas issue. And he was then asking about this setting up of the fund. So, what’s the reserves of the country?
SECRETARY CLINTON: As to the first point, we want very much to encourage both countries to sit down. Now, we cannot make either one do so, but we think it is the right way to proceed. So we will be saying this publicly, as I have been, and we will continue to encourage exactly the kind of discussion across the table that needs to take place.

From the Department of State website.

Professor Michael J. Glennon

As indicated in a previous post, Opinio Juris is hosting the Yale Journal of International Law Online Symposium on Professor Michael Glennon’s article, “The Blank-Prose Crime of Aggression.”  Professor Glennon’s initial post has appeared today. The response of Larry Johnson, former UN Assistant-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs, can be found here. And, finally, my response can be found here.

Be sure to follow Opinio Juris for comments and responses to these posts.