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Interviewing Vice President Riek Machar while covering the South Sudan referendum for The Washington Post
Rebecca Hamilton is a Professor of Law at American University, Washington College of Law (WCL), where her research and teaching focus on human rights and informational technology, national security law, international law, and criminal law.
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The silence emanating from the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, is growing louder by the hour. Three full days after Hamas perpetrated atrocities inside Israel and took civilian hostages into Gaza, Khan has … Read more >>
In its public-facing quarterly financial reports, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, labels all countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East as the “Rest of World.” Although one-third of Facebook’s … Read more >>
B.C. L. Rev (2022). Online intermediaries are omnipresent. Each day, across the globe, the corporations that run these platforms execute policies and practices that serve their profit model, typically by sustaining user engagement. … Read more >>
Harv. Int'l L. J. (2021). Social media platforms are the public square of our era – a reality that has been entrenched by the widespread closure of physical public spaces in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. And this online space is global … Read more >>
Rebecca Hamilton, User-Generated Evidence, Col. J. Transnat'l L. (2018) Around the world, people are using their smartphones to document atrocities. Smartphone apps designed to allow Users to record material that will meet evidentiary … Read more >>
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More background on Gration and the WaPo article
A few people have asked me questions about Gration’s interactions on his latest Sudan trip, especially with respect to some parts of Stephanie McCrummen’s Washington Post article since I posted on it this morning. I thought it could be useful to share my responses:
Stephanie wrote: During a stop in El Fasher, capital of North Darfur state, Gration was greeted like a rock star by hundreds of cheering Bashir supporters in a conference hall plastered with posters of Bashir and Obama, poorly photo-shopped together.
I wrote about this incident in a previous post. I myself wouldn’t characterize Gration as having been “greeted like a rock star” – there was nothing spontaneous or genuine about it. The whole thing was a set-up by the NCP to sell to the Sudanese media (who were present in abundance) that relations were improving between Sudan and the US.
Stephanie also wrote: The rebels explained how the government was now backing a certain rebel faction in order to defeat another, more powerful one. Gration asked who was providing the support. The rebels told him but added that such distinctions were unimportant. “In all cases, it’s the government,” a rebel leader said.
This seems to have generated some confusion, so it might be useful to clarify that the rebel faction that the rebels referred to were Chadian rebels, which Khartoum has long used as proxies to destabilize Darfuri rebel bases in near the border (and not to mention make various unsuccessful attempts at overthrowing Deby). The allegation is that since the split in JEM, the Abu Garda faction (JEM-CL) have been conducting operations that are aligned with the Chadian rebels because both have the goal (consistent with Khartoum’s goal) of defeating JEM (Khalil Ibrahim). When the rebel answering the question said that it didn’t matter which branch of the GOS was doing it, Gration responded that it did because he needed to know who to go and raise it with.
This is probably not yet an exhaustive list of the questions that will arise, so I’ll keep adding my thoughts as needs be.