Topic 1

            On June 28, 2001, the Government of Serbia sent Slobodan Milosevic, the former president of Yugoslavia, to The Hague for trial on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes.  The surrender of Milosevic complied with an international arrest warrant issued by a United Nations judicial body, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, headquartered in The Hague. Milosevic, a Serb nationalist leader, was indicted by the tribunal in May 1999 on allegations of murder and ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanian civilians in Kosovo.

 

            On June 27, 2001, the International Court of Justice (the World Court) issued its judgment on the merits of the LaGrand Case (Germany v. United States).  Walter LaGrand and his brother, German nationals living in the United States, were arrested in Arizona in 1982 on suspicion of armed robbery and murder.  They were not informed of their rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, a multilateral treaty to which both Germany and the United States are parties.  Article 36, paragraph (1)(b) of the Convention provides:

 

            On June 21, 2001, a federal grand jury in the United States indicted 13 Saudi Arabian nationals and one Lebanese national in connection with the truck bombing that killed 19 members of the American military services and wounded nearly 400 others in an apartment building in Saudi Arabia in 1996.  The building was being used as a barracks for U.S. military service personnel.  The bombing allegedly was pursuant to an organized terrorist agenda designed to drive Americans out of the Persian Gulf region.

On May 2, 2001, President George W. Bush announced his administration's intention to deploy defenses against possible missile attacks from states other than those formerly regarded as major threats to the United States. He said that in doing so, "We should leave behind the constraints of an ABM [Anti-Ballistic Missile] Treaty that perpetuates a relationship [with the former Soviet Union] based on distrust and mutual vulnerability."

On April 11, 2001 the US and the EU reached an agreement (the "Agreement") in the decade-long dispute over the EU's banana import regime.  The Agreement requires the EU to abandon its proposal to institute on July 1 a "first-come-first-served" licensing regulation and to move in 2 stages to a tariff-only system by 2006.

 

1)  Introduction

 

On July 28, 2000, the United Nations Economic and Social Council decided to establish, by consensus resolution, a "Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues" as a subsidiary organ of the Council. ECOSOC Res. 2000/22 (available at: http://www.un.org/documents/ecosoc/dec/2000/edec2000-inf2-add2.pdf, pp. 50-52).

2)  Significance