In association with the International Commission of Jurists

January 2006

26 Jan

Today's big news in the narrow category of "celebrities and international law" is that Nicole Kidman has been named a UN goodwill ambassador. The UN Development Fund for Women, to whose work Kidman will be lending her celebrity, issued this press release:As UNIFEM Goodwill Ambassador, her efforts will be geared toward raising awareness on the infringement of women's human rights...

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25 Jan

Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times has an important essay in the New York Review of Books on what he describes as the "opportunistic" genocide of Darfur. Having just returned from Sudan, he paints an utterly depressing picture: "In my years as a journalist, I thought I had seen a full kaleidoscope of horrors, from babies dying of malaria...

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25 Jan

A treaty demarcating undersea maritime boundaries between Australia and New Zealand came into effect today with pretty much no fanfare. The “Treaty between the Government of Australia and the Government of New Zealand establishing certain Exclusive Economic Zone and Continental Shelf Boundaries” was the product of five years of Australia-NZ negotiations. Such negotiations are required by the UN Convention on...

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25 Jan

One of the issues rarely addressed in the debate on reliance on foreign authority to interpret constitutional guarantees is what attitude lower courts should take with respect to the question. As most scholars know, the Missouri Supreme Court in Roper v. Simmons relied on foreign authority in flagrantly departing from Supreme Court precedent in Stanford to hold that the juvenile...

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25 Jan

This week's news of cost overruns and corruption in the UN Peacekeeping office have a familiar ring. Earlier this week, eight UN officials involved in procurement in the peacekeeping division were placed on administrative leave, and the draft of a forthcoming report on fraud and mismanagement estimates that over $298 million may be lost or unaccounted for as a result...

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24 Jan

Ken Anderson has posted Jean-Marie Henckaerts' response to his earlier blog commentary on the International Committee of the Red Cross study on customary international humanitarian law. (See earlier Opinio Juris posts here and here.) Henckaerts, who serves as legal advisor to the ICRC, was one of the co-authors of the study. One of the interesting elements of the response is...

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24 Jan

In case you missed it, President Bush offered a major foreign policy speech yesterday that, among other things, outlined his strategy for the war on terror. It is a long speech that discusses numerous foreign policy issues, but a key component was his summary of the strategy to defeat terrorism: (1) choke off the funding; (2) challenge states that harbor...

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24 Jan

Our own Peggy McGuiness has just published an article in the Missouri Law Review on "The Internationalism of Justice Blackmun." When an international scholar thinks of Justice Blackmun a few cases quickly come to mind: Mitsubishi v. Soler, Aerospatiale, Sale, Goldwater, etc. But as McGuiness outlines, his impact on internationalism is far greater than a few odd cases. It also...

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24 Jan

Just a day after the U.S. and other Western states expressed concern about the possibility of Sudan chairing the African Union, the AU elected Congo to the chair for a year. (See Julian's post.) The compromise allows Sudan to take the chair next year, which doesn't solve the problem, but at least kicks the can down the road for a...

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23 Jan

Canadians voted today in a hotly contested election pitting a resurgent Canadian Conservative Party against a defensive but still dominant Liberal Party. Early results show the Conservatives winning a plurality of the seats. They still may not have enough seats, however, to form a government.I don't have a dog in this race, but I am struck that one of the...

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23 Jan

In an unfortunate rotation, the African Union's annual summit is being held in Khartoum, Sudan this year. This is unfortunate because the host always is nominated for the leadership of the group, but that would mean the AU this year would be headed by perhaps its most unsavory member: the government of Sudan.This minor leadership battle is a larger challenge...

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