ICC Speaker Series - Ambassador David J. Scheffer

***** Please Note Change of Location*****

Abstract: During its first decade, the International Criminal Court has experienced a range of apprehensions and surrenders of indicted suspects, and it has been frustrated by the continued reality of indicted fugitives who remain at large. This talk will examine the record to date and factors that have influenced different strategies employed by the ICC and various governments in cooperation with the Court. In addition to cooperation strategies, Professor Scheffer will discuss the utility of an international instrument that would facilitate more effective means by which to achieve custody of indicted fugitives.

Ambassador David Scheffer is the Mayer Brown/Robert A. Helman Professor of Lawat Northwestern and serves as the Director of the Center for International Human Rights. He teaches International Human Rights Law and International Criminal Law. Scheffer supervises the International Externship Program.  He received the Dean’s Teaching Award 2007-2008 and founded and co-edited (2007-2011) the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor. Scheffer is the U.N. Secretary-General's Special Expert on United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials.  He was selected by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the "Top Global Thinkers of 2011."

Mr. Cherif Bassiouni is Emeritus Professor Law at DePaul University, where he has taught since 1964, and President Emeritus of the International Human Rights Law Institute, which he helped found in 1990. He was one of the founders in 1972 of the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Sciences, Siracusa, Italy, and served as its President since 1988. He is the Honorary President of the International Association of Penal Law after having served three terms as President from 1989-2004. He was a Guest Scholar at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. in 1972, Visiting Professor of Law, New York University Law School in 1971, Fulbright-Hays Professor of International Criminal Law, The University of Freiburg, Germany in 1970, non-resident Professor of Criminal Law at the University of Cairo from 1996 to 2006, and is a frequent lecturer at universities in the U.S. and abroad.

James D. Fearon is Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  His research focuses mainly on political violence – interstate, civil, and ethnic conflict, for example – though he has also worked on aspects of democratic theory and the impact of democracy on foreign policy. He has published numerous articles in scholarly journals, including “Self-Enforcing Democracy” (Quarterly Journal of Economics), “Can Development Aid Contribute to Social Cohesion after Civil War?” (American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings), “Iraq’s Civil War” (Foreign Affairs), “Neotrusteeship and the Problem of Weak States” (co-authored with David Laitin, in International Security), “Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War” (co-authored with David Laitin, in American Political Science Review), and “Rationalist Explanations for War” (International Organization). Fearon was elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002, and has been a Program Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research since 2004. He served as Chair of the Department of Political Science at Stanford from 2008-2010.

This lecture is part of the "Iberian Studies Program Lecture Series"

Antoni Bassas (Barcelona, Catalonia, 1961) is a journalist, and graduated with his degree in journalism from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Since June 2009, Bassas has been the chief correspondent of TV3, Television of Catalonia in the United States, based in Washington DC. This has allowed him to travel and cover major news in the US, from the Obama White House to the Oscars, from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to Superstorm Sandy in New York, from Immigration Law in Arizona to the last take off of the space shuttle in Florida.  He has reported on political primaries, conventions and the presidential campaign, and interviews with people like Yo-Yo Ma, James Taylor, Amy Goodman, Madeleine Albright and Zbigniew Brzezinsky.

Between 1995 and 2008, Bassas was the anchor for the morning news on the Catalan public radio, achieving both outstanding levels of audience and influence in the public life of his country, and receiving  some of the most distinguished radio and TV awards.

Co-sponsored by the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Stanford Humanities Center

Abstract: 
While the debate rages on regarding the role of social media technologies within the Egyptian revolution of 2011, and more generally the larger wave of ‘Arab Spring’ protests, the more relevant question of today is whether the 18 days of revolt may have done more for social media than vice versa. In different manners, social media technologies appear to be central to this discussion. From the Muslim Brotherhood’s use of technology to engage global publics, to activist uses of social media to build grassroots networks which bypass the barriers of infrastructure and access, or blogger uses of social media to impact older top-down media, social media technologies represent critical sites for analysis and critique. Building on two years of ethnographies and interviews, this paper identifies three key themes by which social media technologies shape political power: 1. Moving Past Bubbles, 2. Linking Older and Newer Media, and 3. Digital Subversion.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

Abstract
Ever since we started to organize ourselves socially, we have thought hard and long about how to ensure that we can develop checks on the power that we entrust to some in our organization, and how we can ensure that this power is not abused or misused in different ways. There are several different ways to accomplish this goal - from balancing power between different institutions to limiting it in time. One particularly effective and interesting way to accomplish this goal has always been transparency. If we as members of an organization, citizens in a state or just human beings gain insight into how power is used, and how decisions are made, we can review the exercise of power and act on what we find.

But designing transparency is hard, and requires careful thought. As in all institutional design, the end result needs to reflect the set of relationships in the society we live in, and it needs to change when our circumstances materially change as well. In this essay I will argue that we need to examine what it would mean to change from passive access as the goal of our transparency design to active disclosure, and what new institutional challenges that will present us with.

Nicklas Lundblad is senior policy counsel and head of public policy for Google in Mountain View where he leads a small team of policy experts in analyzing and advising on public policy. He has worked with tech policy since he wrote his first article on the politics of crypto in 1994. Prior to joining Google he was senior executive vice president of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce and co-founded Swedishcurrent affairs magazine Neo.. He currently serves on the Swedish ICT-council, advising the Swedish ICT-minister, works as a member of Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt's reference group on Internet Freedom and has been a member of several corporate and organizational boards. Nicklas was recently elected member of the Royal Engineering Academy in Sweden and is an Eisenhower fellow. In 2009 he was recognized as ICT-person of the year by the two largest computer and business publications in Sweden. He holds a B.A. in philosophy, a L.LM and a PhD in applied information technology. He has served on the e-Europe Advisory Board advising then-ICT-commissioner Reding on i2010 as well as represented Google in the OECD, ICC and WTO.

Abstract:
Initially, the global debate over Internet regulation questioned whether any regulation is necessary. These discussions have since moved beyond this question to consider a wide array of new regulatory challenges, such as which online activities require regulation; what regulation is most effective; and, what is the desired outcome of these regulations.

Latin American countries have in recent years begun addressing these questions through legislation aimed at improving existing regulations. In his recent edited work, “Towards an Internet Free of Censorship: Proposals for Latin America,” Professor Eduardo Bertoni discusses the responsibility of intermediaries, the management of private data, content filtering, and the applicability of jurisdiction, within the context of Latin America. During his presentation, "Internet Regulation in Latin America: Are we Moving in the Right Direction?” Prof. Bertoni will expand upon these themes by exploring the legal questions they raise and will present specific cases from Latin America to illustrate recent examples of regulatory challenges. The presentation will encourage a discussion of how these questions and alternatives can be answered in Latin America, with a comparative perspective in mind. These answers are of crucial importance due to the effect they could have on the politics of freedom of expression.

 Prof. Eduardo Bertoni is director of the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information at Palermo University School of Law, in Buenos Aires. He teaches Human Rights and Criminal law at Palermo University and University of Buenos Aires. He served as executive director of the D.C.-based Due Process of Law Foundation from 2006 to 2009 and as special rapporteur for freedom of expression of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights at the Organization of American States from 2002 to 2005. Prof. Bertoni has also been a legal advisor to nongovernmental human rights organizations in Argentina and an advisor to Argentina’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. He has published opinion pieces on democracy and human rights in leading newspapers in the Americas and has written several publications on the right to freedom of expression, judicial reforms, and international criminal law. During his fellowship, Prof. Bertoni plans to explore the prospects for and obstacles to freedom of expression on the Internet in Latin America, including recommendations to ensure that increased access to the Internet promotes, rather than undermines, free speech.

Abstract
Each week brings new stories of how people use digital media to break the rules of political power. Or more accurately, each week brings new stories about how people have used digital media to upset powerful elites, demand political freedoms, and look for justice. Activists armed only with mobile phones take breathtaking risks because they feel empowered by the supporting social networks they have been able to build and nurture for themselves. Yet sometimes digital media also gets used for evil, and we find drug lords, holy thugs, and rogue generals using the latest information technologies to oppress the communities they rule. So how do we add up the impact of such technologies on international politics? If digital media is so important to revolutionaries, dictators and corporate interests around the world, what are the new rules of engagement in global power politics? We are entering a period of global political life I call the Pax Technica that is made possible because of new information technologies. This peace is not so much the absence of war but the presence of transparent governments, empowered citizens, open information systems, and shared norms of information access. Governments don’t always want to be opened up for scrutiny, and activists don’t always use social media very well. But it is clear that the rules of global power politics have changed.

Philip N. Howard is professor of communication, information and international studies at the University of Washington. Currently, he is a fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. His latest book is Democracy’s Fourth Wave? Digital Media and the Arab Spring.  His writings appear at http://philhoward.org and tweets from @pnhoward.