Alexa Koenig writes for US News and World Report, Debate Club, February 6, 2013
President Obama has repeatedly confirmed that taking the lives of Americans—even those affiliated with terrorist organizations—is subject to constitutional due process protections. The recent white paper justifying drone strikes against U.S. citizens is therefore a troubling contradiction.
John Yoo quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, February 6, 2013
“What’s the greater deprivation of liberties?” asked UC Berkeley law professor John Yoo, who wrote some of the Bush Justice Department legal opinions that authorized CIA use of enhanced interrogation techniques―waterboarding or incinerating?
Stanley Lubman writes for The Wall Street Journal, China RealTime Report, February 4, 2013
The arbitrary system of police detention … or re-education through labor, has fallen so far out of favor that one China police chief cited the virtues of dissent for patriotic purposes to make a case for ending it. Growing criticism of this decades-old practice is encouraging. But if official statements aren’t accompanied by meaningful legal reform, police will likely keep locking up minor offenders at will under various forms of house arrest.
Alexa Koenig interviewed by Marin Independent Journal, February 3, 2013
“I found that for men who were placed in Guantanamo, far away from anyone else who understood their culture or spoke their language, it was sometimes as bad as if not worse than being in solitary confinement, because they were so isolated from any human interaction or understanding.”
Charles Halpern quoted in ABA Journal, February 1, 2013
“On orientation day for first-year students,” says Charles Halpern, director of the initiative, “where we were presenting the activities of the Berkeley initiative for the first time … a young woman came up to me and said she’d had to choose between Stanford and Berkeley—and she said she chose Berkeley because of this program.”
Alexa Koenig quoted in Portland Press Herald, February 1, 2013
Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California School of Law in Berkeley, said in an email: “While I’m skeptical as to whether the impact of such judgments could be measured in any meaningful way, certainly any tools that can be used to mitigate the threat of terrorism are laudable. At a minimum, such judgments send a strong symbolic message about the extent to which terrorist acts are condemned.”