I'm also back after another short hiatus. I will post at greater length later this week, but for now I just wanted to note some recent pushback on those controversial Article 98 Agreements between the U.S. with a number of its allies preventing U.S. soldiers from being extradited to the International Criminal Court. Nigeria's Senate recently passed...
I just wanted to check in with everyone from the Opinio Juris Central Command Bunker hidden deep in the hills of… well, it doesn’t really matter where we are. Peggy, Julian and I will start showing up a bit more as we are in the process of finishing up articles and/or traveling.I wanted to post this general comment, though, on...
If we consider the quantity of people affected and the quality of the effect, there is no greater injustice in the world today than the denial of equal rights for women. I’m talking specifically about women in fundamentalist Muslim countries in the Middle East. I am also talking about women in fundamentalist Catholic countries in Latin America, although...
[Note: here is Tony D'Amato's latest post. I am posting it for him because we seem to be having a software glitch. I have isolated the problem to the hyperlinks so I have removed the links from this post so that the full text may appear. Once the problem is fixed, we will put the links back in. ~ Chris]The...
I continue to be amazed when educated people say that international law is not binding on the United States, or that international law cannot be enforced against a superpower, or that the United States can violate international law whenever it wants to, or that international law doesn’t exist.Let’s take the strongest of these claims: the enforcement claim. Let’s stipulate...
When I was a kid with my eyes glued to the silver screen, I wondered why Ingrid Bergmann and Humphrey Bogart were taking their sweet time in getting out of Paris. There they were with German tanks proceeding relentlessly toward them and the noise of artillery fire in the distance. But where was the Luftwaffe? Where were...
Should President Harry S Truman be regarded today as a war criminal for ordering the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago? If history indicts him for the two events, I would argue that as to Count Two, the bombing of Nagasaki, he was clearly guilty and would have deserved the death sentence. The horror of...
Our government is presently immobilized, like Buridan’s ass, between North Korea’s nuclear development program and Iran’s. Yesterday Iran removed United Nations seals on uranium processing equipment at its Isfahan nuclear site, making the plant fully operational. At the same time across the world in Beijing a deadlock was reported in the six-power nuclear disarmament talks. North Korea intends to go...
Many of our younger international scholars are rightfully insisting that nations own up to their past atrocities. They are pressing Japan to fully disclose the enslavement of Korean “comfort women” who were forced to accompany the rampaging Japanese armies in China during the second world war. The scholars are demanding that Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia give a full...
I only recently noticed this op-ed by Cuba expert Wayne Smith, a former head of the U.S. Interests section in Havana, noting that Cuba could easily claim the use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center violates the Agreement between the United States and Cuba for the Lease of Lands for Coaling Stations, the treaty which is the basis for...
I didn’t intend to sound disparaging about humanitarian intervention, but when the above title occurred to me I just couldn’t resist using it. Come to think of it, Howard Cosell would have been pleased; the title “tells it like it is.”The international legality of humanitarian intervention is on my mind these days because I’m trying to scribble out a Foreword...
I also want to welcome Professor D'Amato to Opinio Juris. And, in the typical Opinio Juris fashion, I want to welcome him by immediately taking exception to some of the arguments he put forward in his inaugural post.I agree that Judge Roberts should be held responsible for the D.C. Circuit's decision in Hamdan as much as if he had written...
