The Pentagon released new rules today governing procedures in military commission trials (the USA Today account is here and the WSJ account is here). Note that these rules will not directly affect the consideration of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (the case I discussed here involving Osama Bin Laden's driver) because the petitioner there is challenging the legality of the military commissions...
By many measures, the U.S. relationship with Canada is its most important. After all, Canada is its most important trading partner and shares the longest border with the U.S. Yet how to explain the continuing recent war of words between the U.S. and Canada. After new U.S. ambassador to Canada David Wilkins chided the Canadian government for "emotional outburts"...
The NYTimes carries this article today on the dissolution of the venerable Coudert Brothers, arguably the first truly international law firm. While Coudert managed to maintain some of its prestige, it has been falling farther and farther behind on profits during the last decade or so. Its dissolution comes as no surprise....
The BBC is reporting that China has ratified the World Health Organization's Framework Convention onTobacco Control. This make China the 78th party to the FCTC according to the WHO website (contrary to the BBC's report).This treaty is an easy treaty to ratify for most countries, because it doesn't really require them to do anything that they don't want. In this...
The final draft of the permanent Iraqi Constitution can be found here. The lack of support from Sunni representatives and the Constitution's subordination of any law to "the undisputed rules of Islam" is certainly the big news.It is also interesting to note, however, that the new Constitution cuts back substantially from the internationalist commitments of the interim Constitution. As I...
Peggy, Julian, and I want to thank Tony for his guest blogging with us for the past couple of weeks. The discussion he spurred was lively, to say the least, and we look forward to his continuing to comment on the discussions on this blog and then returning as guest blogger in the not-to-distant future.As for the usual suspects,...
I’ve talked about Muslim women and international law. Where are they? Where am I? I am sitting here at my keyboard, a lump of protoplasm surrounded by skin. International law is external to me. The Islamic people are external to me. Do I have a right to interfere with these external things? Do they have a right to interfere with...
Some versions of the proposed text for Iraq's Constitution have been posted here. Now Prof. D'Amato has already suggested there are possible conflicts between the proposed text's commitment to Islamic law and to international law. Which naturally leads to the legal question: in a conflict between domestic Iraqi law and international law, which law will prevail in the...
I suppose we can divide human rights into two types: those that people want, and those they don’t want. In the preceding parts of this thread, I’ve set out what I think is one of the hardest cases of the second type. I’ve pictured a Muslim woman (taking the term Muslim generically for present purposes—there are of course...
The UN has released more information on the eight candidates for the 5 opening slots on the ICJ here.Amor, Abdelfattah (Tunisia)Bennouna, Mohamed (Morocco)Buergenthal, Thomas (United States of America)González Campos, Julio D. (Spain)Keith, Kenneth (New Zealand)Mazou, Seidou Adamou (Niger)Sepúlveda Amor, Bernardo (Mexico)Skotnikov, Leonid (Russian Federation)Here is a useful horse-race analysis from a knowledgeable source who works for a government agency:There are...
In my attempt to understand the mind-set of a Muslim woman, I will put into one combination speech the words of many Muslim women who have talked to me over the years, plusa lot from the scholarly literature of Western observers—primarily women—who have studied the lives of Muslim women:We know more than you think about American women. We...
U.S.-Canada trade relations appear to have hit a new low as Canada has suspended further settlement talks over U.S. tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber. This may sound fairly trivial compared to some of the rather momentous topics that Prof. D'Amato has treated Opinio Juris readers to over the past week and a half, but I think the problems Canada is...
