In association with the International Commission of Jurists

June 2007

30 Jun

They are:Sydney Opera House, Australia Old town of Corfu, Greece Red Fort Complex, India Bordeaux, France Volcanic island of Jeju, South Korea Iwami Ginzan silver mine, Japan Parthian fortresses of Nisa, Turkmenistan Samarra archaeological city, Iraq Rideau Canal, Canada Mehmed Pasa Sokolovic Bridge, Bosnia-Herzegovina Teide National Park, Spain Primeval beech forests of the Carpathian, Ukraine Lope-Okanda, Gabon Richtersveld Cultural and Botanical Landscape, South Africa Twyfelfontein, Namibia Diaolou villages in Kaiping, ChinaI hope that the new...

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30 Jun

Today is the fifth anniversary of the Rome Statute's entry into force. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued the following statement:1 July 2007 marks the fifth anniversary of the entry into force of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The creation of the Court represents one of the major achievements in international law during the past century....

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29 Jun

A few blogs have recently been posting on security issues in Oceania. Since this is a topic we rarely cover, I wanted to point out a couple of posts that I found informative and enlightening. Coming Anarchy, which has organized the series of posts, has a piece on Oceania’s regions: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. (The post is actually by guest...

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28 Jun

The Supreme Court term ended today. In terms of cases relevant to Opinio Juris readers, there was only one blockbuster case, Massachusetts v. EPA. We profited from various posts about that case already, including contributions from Hari Osofsky, Dan Bodansky, and John Knox. But beyond that one case, in my opinion there was nothing of significance this...

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28 Jun

My colleague Michael Perino, who teaches and writes in the area of securities regulation, had the following comment regarding the sovereign wealth funds discussion in my earlier post:One point of perspective worth keeping in mind is that shareholders (despite some of the claims in the article) are quite weak in the US. In large part that weakness flows from collective...

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28 Jun

Curtis Bradley has posted an advance version of a forthcoming piece in the Supreme Court Review on last term's decision in Sanchez-Llamas v. Oregon. It's well worth a close read, although I think it ultimately makes too much out of a case that is at best way-station material. The piece for instance argues that Sanchez-Llamas is more important...

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27 Jun

On Monday, I visited the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) here in Rome for a series of presentations on their legal offices and their current work (for an interesting take on a presentation we heard about the “right to food” check out my colleague David Hoffman’s views over at Concurring Opinions). Among the presentations, one struck me as...

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27 Jun

It seems that in the first dozen years of the WTO there has been a tremendous amount of litigation about environmental protection and health measures. The key question in these cases often has been whether government action to advance such health and environmental concerns is consistent with WTO obligations. But what has been surprisingly absent from the WTO...

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27 Jun

For better or for worse, Africa has become the leading testing ground for mechanisms of international criminal justice in this decade: e.g. Rwanda, Uganda, Congo, Sierra Leone, and Sudan. Generally speaking, African opinion makers have seemed pretty supportive of such processes, but there are signs of a backlash brewing. Uganda: As this report from the Independent reminds us, the...

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26 Jun

The CIA has declassified the “Family Jewels.” (Press release here.) Also known as the “Book of Skeletons,” this document was compiled in 1973 under Director of Central Intelligence James Schlesinger, in the aftermath of the revelations from the Watergate investigation and other reports of CIA bad acts. Wanting to get a handle of the situation, of the skeletons in...

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26 Jun

Sebastian Mallaby has an excellent essay in Monday’s Washington Post on a silent revolution in globalization. He writes:The next globalization battle lurks over the horizon, but you can already guess its contours. It will be shaped by two revolutions in finance and business: the growth of vast government-controlled investment funds abroad and the muddled progress toward shareholder democracy in...

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25 Jun

Last year, Julian had written a post about a dispute between China and Japan over whether certain rocks in the ocean should be considered islands. If they are islands, then Japan would have a significantly larger Exclusive Economic Zone than had been previously recognized. To bolster the view that these are islands, not mere rocks, Japan has...

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