In association with the International Commission of Jurists

January 2012

18 Jan

Gabor Rona posted a response to Jens Ohlin yesterday.  Jens responded at LieberCode -- and now Gabor has responded to Jens's response (and John Dehn's comment on his OJ post).  Here is what Jens wrote (reposted with permission): Many thanks to Gabor Rona for taking the time to continue this conversation.  There’s a lot in Rona’s post, but I want to...

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18 Jan

The Obama administration announced the demise today of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have done nothing to promote America's energy independence but everything to promote climate change: President Barack Obama on Wednesday rejected a Canadian company's plan to build a U.S.-spanning, 1,700-mile (2,700 kilometer) pipeline to carry oil across six U.S. states to Texas refineries, raising the stakes...

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18 Jan

English-language OJ readers are fortunate to have University of Connecticut's Peter Lindseth spending the semester in Berlin as the Daimler Fellow at the American Academy, where among other things he is posting to the Eutopia law blog on various governance issues in Europe.  (As I indicated in my earlier post, I plan to concentrate on international economic law, governance issues, and international and comparative law issues - including ones like this one, EU governance, in which as a non-specialist, I plan to act as facilitator, raising questions.)  In a recent Eutopia post, Lindseth pointed to an interview in Der Spiegel with Udo di Fabio, outgoing member of the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC).  The interview is fascinating, particularly as glossed in Lindseth's post:
As readers of [Eutopia blog] know well, the FCC has played, and will continue to play, a critical role in defining the constitutional parameters of Germany’s role in the ongoing struggle to resolve the Eurozone crisis. The Court’s jurisprudence will necessarily loom large as long as Germany serves as the Eurozone’s paymaster, and as long as the Court insists, as a matter of domestic constitutional law, on two conditions related to that function: first, that Germany’s financial participation in any bailouts must be determinate and not open-ended (i.e., no Eurobonds or other instruments amounting to joint and several liability); and second, that the national legislature must, consistent with historically grounded yet evolving conceptions of parliamentary democracy, be given an effective voice in approving the extent of Germany’s financial participation. The FCC views these two conditions as essential to preserving Germany’s democratic sovereignty in the face of the evident functional demands of the crisis, even as the Court otherwise permits, indeed even encourages, further European integration. In the current environment, these parameters will be critical because the resolution of the crisis will almost certainly demand some very costly sacrifices by the German taxpayer.
A second post from Lindseth, following the French credit downgrade, asks two key questions about German governance institutions:
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17 Jan

Jens Ohlin has continued the conversation about IHL and IHRL at LieberCode.  Here is a snippet, self-servingly chosen because I want to comment on it: It strikes me as curious that human rights activists are so quick to cabin CIL application of the IHL rules of IAC to NIAC.  To my ear, it is one of the great advancements...

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17 Jan

The following is a guest-post by Gabor Rona, the International Legal Director of Human Rights First.  It is a response to a post at LieberCode by Jens Ohlin, a Professor at Cornell Law School, that argues international human rights law (IHRL) does not apply in armed conflict, because it is displaced by international humanitarian law (IHL). Prof. Ohlin’s conclusion that IHRL...

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16 Jan

There has been much debate the past couple of days about whether the bomb attacks that have killed at least three Iranian nuclear scientists since 2010 qualify as terrorism.  Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum on the left and Andrew Sullivan on the right say "yes"; many of their readers (see Greenwald here) and the editor of Technology Review say "no." ...

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16 Jan

Tomorrow, as part of its Leading Figures in International Dispute Resolution Series, the ASIL’s International Courts and Tribunals Interest Group (ICTIG) will host a talk by Meg Kinnear, Secretary General of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) to discuss the ICSID system for settling investor-state disputes. The event details are as follows: ASIL Headquarters, Tillar House 2223 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington DC 20008 January 17, 2012 6:00...

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13 Jan

I had the good fortune yesterday to spend the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To my great surprise, I experienced my first encounter with treaties as art. A special exhibit on display through March 26, 2012 of the work of Sanja Iveković entitled Sweet Violence focuses on the plight of women in post-Communist...

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12 Jan

The media has been abuzz the past couple of days about a video that shows four U.S. Marines urinating on dead Taliban soldiers.  The military's response to the blossoming controversy has been admirable.  In addition to the Pentagon quickly confirming its authenticity, the Navy has stated that it is "deeply troubled by the video. Whoever it is, and whatever the...

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12 Jan

I want to call readers' attention to a very useful new essay written by Emory's Laurie Blank, which is forthcoming in the William Mitchell Law Review.  Here is the abstract: Targeted strikes – predominantly using drones – have become the operational counterterrorism tool of choice for the United States over the past few years. Targeted killing can...

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