My various postings and pronouncements on the rights and wrongs of the UK government’s ‘threat’ to remove the diplomatic immunity of the Ecuador Embassy in London to enable J Assange to be nabbed have prompted Brian Barder to weigh in. And when Brian weighs in, he does so thoroughly. His […]
The Assange case is stuck and embarrassing. How might one look at this issue as a professional mediator? As things stand, the interests of Assange/Ecuador and UK/Sweden respectively largely coincide. Assange/Ecuador want to use the issue to bolster their reputations and poke the US/West in the eye. UK/Sweden want to […]
In a comment on my earlier post, my old sparring partner and inveterate contrarian Brian Barder takes up the challenge re diplomatic immunity and Assange: Entertaining knockabout, Charles, but completely wrong. The embassy’s premises are unequivocally immune from entry without the agreement of the ambassador, under international law as laid down […]
With Ecuador set to make an announcement later today about Julian Assange and his bid for asylum (he currently is skulking in their Embassy in London) the BBC World Service have just interviewed me for some background on the way bids for ‘asylum’ in Embassies work in practice. I drew on my […]
Having gone through a full cheery diplomatic career without having read the Vienna Convention, I thought that I would see if J Assange might be popp’d in an Ecuadoran Diplomatic Bag and removed from the UK that way. In other words, can he be ‘smuggled’ out in broad sight or […]
My piece over at Transconflict about Bosnia has attracted all sorts of the usual lively comments. Including the magnificent Owen: The stale odour of complacent Majorite neo-realism, sexed up with an intro of pure, ineffable Foreign Office superiority and disdain for lesser breeds Excellent! Then there’s several from bosniak-Radislav, which get […]
Jasmin Mujanovic, a self-styled ‘proud Wobby’ young left-anarchist based in Canada but with Bosniak roots, has written at some length on the problems of the Dayton Peace Accords. He offers his suggestions for making progress, seemingly a BH-wide series of open meetings at which Bosnians define for themselves new constitutional principles. […]
Here is my latest piece at Telegraph Blogs: Our Ambassador to the United Nations Sir Mark Lyall-Grant has come out strongly against this further Russia/Chinese veto: “Russia and China are failing in their responsibilities as permanent members, they are failing the people of Syria … The effect of their actions […]
A very smart article by Tom Smith over in San Diego, pointing out how Government scrambles to assert to itself an inordinate share of private success but breezily overlooks all the failures it’s caused: It’s difficult to even explain how pervasive, expensive, frustrating and sometimes just plain insuperable the regulatory […]
Part of the general problem we face these days is knowing what anything is. As we get better at looking at things on quite different scales, down to sub-atomic tininess, different patterns emerge. What looks like a solid, recognisable, definable thing turns out to be system of systems of systems. A lot […]
