Weekend Roundup: July 28 – August 3, 2012

This week on Opinio Juris we provided a forum to two guest posters, Gabor Rona and Michael W. Lewis, who continued their earlier conversation on targeted killing over at Lawfare. In his first post, Gabor asked whether the politicians and military leaders in charge of defining the criteria for targetability will take a more liberal attitude because their own risk is zero and argued that the concept of ‘co-belligerency’ cannot as easily be transposed from an international armed conflict to a non-international armed conflict. Michael Lewis disagreed that leaders are willing to take higher risks with civilian lives and argued that the application or IHL or HRL should not depend on whether a group focuses on military, or only on civilian targets. Since Michael had the final word over at Lawfare, Gabor was given the final word this time.

Ken Anderson marked the passing of Sir John Keegan and reminisced on his own interactions with him.

As you may remember, in June Kevin intensively covered Melinda Taylor’s detention in Libya. He followed up on this with a discussion of the OPCD’s response to Libya’s admissibility challenge which contains a detailed account of the facts leading up to, and during, her detention. He also added a swatch with hidden spy capacities to his wish list for his next 29th birthday. In another post, Kevin fine-tuned his earlier argument that an ICC case does not become admissible simply because the national investigation or prosecution does not live up to international standards of due process. The added nuance is that a case would be admissible if a state does not live up to its domestic standards of due process.

Kevin gleefully noted how the climate change denial camp lost a high profile member whose research funded by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation revealed results that the donors probably were not too thrilled about.

As always, we provided you with our daily news wraps and with a list of upcoming events. Junior Faculty Members may also be interested to read more about the Second Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law to take place at Nottingham in May 2013.

Thank you to our guest posters and have a nice weekend!