For those following the ongoing public controversy surrounding the film's depiction of the hunt for bin Laden, two notes. First, the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute hosted a forum on the film featuring three of the former CIA officials centrally involved at the policy level in the "enhanced interrogation" program: former General Counsel John Rizzo, former CIA director Michael...
Israel has carried out air strikes close to the Syria-Lebanese border. Donors have pledged $1.5 million to aid civilians displaced by the conflict in Syria. British PM Cameron has visited Algeria to discuss responses to the threat of terrorism. French troops have captured the last Islamist stronghold in Mali. ICC Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda warned the Malian government over reports of human rights abuses by Malian forces. The UN Human Rights Council...
Apropos of Kevin's recent posts, Professor George Bisharat of UC Hastings Law School takes to the NYT op-ed pages to call for Palestine to join the ICC and seek investigation of Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians’ first attempt to join the I.C.C. was thwarted last April when the court’s chief prosecutor at the time, Luis Moreno-Ocampo,...
[Jonathan Hafetz is an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School] A recent Washington Post story posits that the rendition of terrorism suspects has continued under the Obama administration. While the story fails to describe how renditions have changed since the Bush administration, it highlights several areas of concern. The story focuses on the prosecution of three European men with...
Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has appealed to the UN Security Council to take action on Syria which he said is "breaking up before everyone's eyes". Meanwhile, there are reports of a new massacre in Aleppo as more than 71 bodies were found by a river. Israel has boycotted the Human Rights Council's Universal Periodic Review of the rights situation in Israel, which has left the body with...
[Alexander Wills is an LLM student at Leiden University] Kevin’s earlier posts (here, here and here), and the robust discussion they provoked, centred on two key questions: Can Article 12(3) declarations can have effect retroactively; and Can State Parties lodge declarations under Article 12(3)? I don’t propose to repeat the points Kevin made earlier, but to briefly provide some additional material suggesting an affirmative...
[Başak Çalı is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Human Rights at the University College London] This post is the third in a series of three. In my previous post, I reviewed the Von Hannover (2) and Fatullayev cases to illustrate my argument that the standard of judicial review used by the European Court of Human Rights is variable. Notably, the Strasbourg Court chooses to employ a...
Michael Lewis claims, in his very interesting post, that "it is fair to say that if Israel’s action in the 1967 war was justified by Article 51 (something that most states, if not most scholars, seem to agree with), then Article 51 'imminence' is broader than Caroline 'imminence'." I don't have time today to address that claim in any detail, but I...
After reviewing the comments from my last post expressing general dissatisfaction with the chart showing the legal systems of the world, I decided to do a little more research to find a more accurate chart. Fortunately, those efforts paid off in spades, with a series of wonderful charts produced by the University of Ottawa. As you can see,...
Perhaps some OJ readers caught this abstract from the SSRN public international law postings this week, but if you didn't, I want to commend it to you: Eyal Benvenisti and Amichai Cohen, "War as Governance: Explaining the Logic of the Laws of War from a Principal-Agent Perspective." I have read it once, and plan to re-read it; I've long followed...
[Michael Lewis is a Professor at Ohio Northern University’s Petit College of Law and a former F-14 pilot for the US Navy.] Peter Margulies’s recent posts here at Opinio Juris and over at Lawfare broadly covered the issues raised and discussed at the Boundaries of the Battlefield symposium recently hosted by the Asser Institute at the Hague. I just wanted to...
Rep. Edward Royce, Chairman of the US House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, has urged China to participate in the arbitration proceedings lodged by the Philippines over their dispute regarding the South China Sea. The US military has started preparations for a drone base in Western Africa, presumably in Niger or in Burkina Faso. A judge in Guatemala has ordered Mr Rios Montt, a former dictator and...
