In association with the International Commission of Jurists

March 2010

22 Mar

Today's Financial Times has a story on how unhappy U.S. businesses have become about Chinese government restrictions interfering with their access to Chinese markets.  So, one can understand how U.S. exporters would welcome news that the United States and China are getting closer to including a Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT).  And, let's be clear, this would be the mother-of-all BITs, given...

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22 Mar

Bangladesh has ratified the Rome Statute, making it the 111th member of the International Criminal Court.  Bangladesh was the first country in South Asia to sign the Statute, which it did on July 17, 1998.  I don't know what explains the 12-year gap between signature and ratification; if any readers know, please chime in below. Bangladesh's ratification will have immediate dividends. ...

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22 Mar

FADE IN: INT. KEVIN'S OFFICE -- DAY KEVIN (obscenely young, ridiculously handsome) sits at his desk, poring through archival material.  An AUSSIE STUDENT (even younger, not as handsome) enters. AUSSIE: Hey, sorry to interrupt.  Just wanted to say congratulations.  I heard the U.S. passed universal health care. KEVIN: Thanks, but it's not actually universal.  More than 20 million people still won't have health insurance. AUSSIE:...

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19 Mar

Our friends at the University of Amsterdam's Center for International Law have asked us to announce the European Science Foundation's upcoming conference, The Responsibility to Protect: From Principle to Practice.  Here is the description of the conference, which sounds like it's well worth attending: Five years after its acceptance by the 2005 World Summit, it is time to consider the...

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18 Mar

Japan triumphs in a big way at the CITES meeting in Doha, as the U.S. proposed ban on bluefin tuna trade goes down 20-68. The rejection of the bluefin proposal was a clear victory for the Japanese government, which had vowed to go all out to stop the measure or else exempt itself from complying with it. Japan, which consumes nearly...

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18 Mar

I am not a huge fan of restrictive and protectionist trade policy, but I can't offer any serious legal quarrel with the recently proposed Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act by the growing anti-trade bloc in the U.S. Congress.  As Lori Wallach from Public Citizen notes, the Act offers a radically new approach to U.S. trade policy.  The Act explicitly...

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16 Mar

Sure there is some dispute about settlements in East Jerusalem, or something, but here are some international law disputes that really matter. At CoP15, or the 15th Meeting of the Parties to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species - currently going on in Doha, parties are discussing: resuming (or not resuming) the trade in ivory and imposing a...

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15 Mar

The general consensus among comments to my post last week on the previously-unacknowledged U.S.-Japanese security agreements was "no big deal."  These pacts reinforce an already well-developed practice of states doing deals--whether legally binding or political commitments--without U.N. registration or public disclosure.  Similarly, they reinforce existing views of Executive authority to conclude sole-executive agreements on defense-related matters for the United States.  So, if everyone's OK with such...

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15 Mar

Ilya Somin has a characteristically thoughtful post on the shortcomings of the U.N. system for promoting human rights and of international human rights law more generally, as seen in the recent hapless efforts of the U.N. Human Rights Council to protect Iranians from repression by their own government. The bottom line is that the main weaknesses of the international human rights...

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