“A Kosovan man shot in the jaw by a British soldier has been awarded £2.4 million compensation after suing the Ministry of Defence. The sum is more than eight times the maximum damages available to UK troops seriously injured abroad, and has been criticised by the relatives of disabled veterans.” Muhamet Bici had been “in a car with other men who were firing weapons into the air to celebrate a national holiday” in Pristina, the capital of Kosovo; a Military Police probe cleared British soldiers who shot at the car of charges of wrongdoing, saying they reasonably if erroneously believed themselves in danger. (Matthew Moore, “MoD pays out £2.4m to Kosovan shot in the jaw”, Daily Telegraph, Nov. 6).
Posts Tagged ‘international human rights’
November 3 roundup
- M.D.s and J.D.s in cahoots: when neuroradiologists over-read MRIs in search of “disc herniations” and “cord compression” [ER Stories]
- Lawyer burns his Harvard law diploma, and stop with that joking in the back row about whether there’s some way to burn all of them [ABA Journal]
- Latest lawsuit arising from fad for photos of “Hot Chicks with Dorky Men” (that’s a paraphrase) [TMZ, QuizLaw, earlier]
- Kid draws scary Hallowe’en mask, and next thing you know the police are called [Savannah Morning News]
- Great moments in international human rights: “Modern European navies are now so mindful of the legal loopholes they face in tackling pirates that they often instruct commanders to simply let them go.” [Telegraph; earlier here, here]
- China has four times the number of people we have in the U.S., while we have seven times the number of lawyers [Elefant]
- “Vaccine injury” lawyer Clifford Shoemaker fails in effort to curtail public access to fee information, so we get to learn more about his $211,663.37 bill to the government [Seidel, Neurodiversity; related here and here]
- More about that Milberg basketball team and its 6′ 8″ ringer [Supreme Dicta]
War crimes trials? No thanks
Stuart Taylor agrees that the courts are right to rebuke some of the Bush administration’s aggressive war-powers claims, but that doesn’t make it anything other than a “deeply misguided” notion to try its leaders for supposed “war crimes”, let alone encourage other countries to snatch traveling U.S. ex-officials for trial there (“Our Leaders Are Not War Criminals”, National Journal, Jun. 28).
One of the most dedicated enthusiasts for such trials is attorney/controversialist Scott Horton, who writes at Harper’s and Balkinization and is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia Law School; after noticing how often Horton’s output seemed to be in need of fact-checking, I spent a few minutes just for the fun of it stringing together a sampling of such instances which appears here (scroll).