Weekend Roundup: September 22-28, 2012

This week on Opinio Juris, one of us was facing a legal challenge of his own. You can read Kevin Jon Heller’s account of Chevron’s subpoena for 9 years of IP-logs for his gmail-account here.

Ken Anderson is back to blogging, and discussed the leading issues at this week’s opening of the UN General Assembly in a post that also reflected on whether a sitting US President has anything to gain from a meaningful UN speech during an election year. In a different post, Ken reproduced the text of Obama’s speech as prepared for delivery. Further on UN appearances, Kevin wondered whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s “red line” about Iran’s nuclear bomb could still be taken seriously.

Other posts also dealt with Iran. Kevin asked why progressive bloggers were so willing to overlook the MEK’s involvement in the assassination of Iranian scientists when claiming that the organization has not been involved in terrorist attacks for years, and Deborah Pearlstein wrote about new drone technology reportedly developed by Iran.

In a guest post, Chantal Meloni argued why the Palestine-ICC saga is far from over, despite the April 3, 2012 update by the OTP. Another guest post, by Polina Levina and Kaveri Vaid, argued that the allegations of torture in a recent Human Rights Watch report qualify as war crimes under the Rome Statute, and are thus relevant for the OTP’s preliminary investigation into the situation in Afghanistan.

Our journal symposia are also back after the Northern Hemisphere summer break. The Harvard International Law Journal kicked off with a symposium on “The Democratic Coup d’Etat“, an article by Ozan Varol. The article argues that not all military coups are alike from an anti-democracy perspective. Joel Colón-Ríos’s response advanced on a more restricted concept of a democratic coup that focuses not only on the end result but also on the process through which the change came about. David Landau argued how the article illustrates the absence of an accurate vocabulary about military coups and how it raises further questions about the constitutional implications of various models of military entrenchment in post-coup constitutions. William Partlett provided a pragmatist response, and Brad Roth criticized the article’s reduction of democracy to “a narrow set of institutions and procedures”. Ozan Varol’s response to the comments can be found here.

In other announcements, Jessica welcomed Armed Groups and International Law to the blogosphere, and we posted about upcoming events and wrapped up the news. 

Many thanks to all our guest posters and have a nice weekend!