Weekend Roundup: June 2-8, 2012

This week on Opinio Juris, we are happy to announce that the blog is now available on Kindle devices to our US readers. This new feature allows you to read the blog even when you are not wirelessly connected, and we hope that those of you who are often on the road will appreciate it. We of course welcome any feedback.

As always, you could rely on Kevin Jon Heller this week to keep you up-to-date with developments at the International Criminal Court. On Saturday, he was not convinced by the ICC’s Pre-Trial Chamber’s decision that article 95 of the ICC Statute applies to requests for surrender, and it was not only because they did not agree with him on this point. Later in the week, he was more positive about the OTP’s response to Libya’s challenge to the admissibility of the cases against Saif Gaddafi and Abdullah al-Senussi. Further on international criminal law issues, Marina Aksenova argued in a guest post why Charles Taylor’s sentence is adequate.

Kevin congratulated the Chief International Co-Prosecutor of the ECCC, Andrew Cayley, on taking silk in England, and the editors of a new book on International Prosecutors to which he contributed a chapter.

Other recent scholarship by our permanent bloggers includes Roger Alford’s recent article on the WTO Security exception, which although self-judging is rarely invoked in bad faith by WTO Members. Julian Ku’s book with John Yoo was discussed in a podcast with Martin Flaherty and at an American Enterprise Institute conference on the impact of globalization on US sovereignty of which Julian posted a video that also featured Opinio Juris’  Peter Spiro.

In other posts, Julian placed a bet that the EU would eventually give in to political pressure over its controversial decision to include international aviation in its Emission Trading Scheme, Ken Anderson discussed the alphabet soup of UN agencies and Duncan Hollis welcomed Cyber Dialogue to the blogosphere.

At the start of the week, we hosted a symposium on the new edited volume on Targeted Killings, introduced here by Jens David Ohlin. On Monday, Craig Martin and Jens discussed whether in the armed conflict paradigm jus ad bellum or jus in bello principles should govern the legality of targeted killings, and the related question whether an armed conflict with al-Qaeda exists. The distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, was also central to Richard Meyer’s comments on Tuesday of Col. Maxwell’s chapter on status-based targeting. John C. Dehn provided the response. On Wednesday, the discussion dealt with the distinction between the armed conflict paradigm versus the law enforcement paradigm. Andrew Altman commented on Fernando Tesón’s proposal to take a middle ground between the two paradigms to which Fernando Tesón responded here.

Continuing on the subject of targeted killings, John C. Dehn provided another guest post criticizing John Yoo’s statements that Obama is micro-managing the drone attacks.

Finally, as usual, we also brought you the weekday news wrap and a list of upcoming events and call for papers.

Thank you very much to our guest contributors and have a nice weekend!