Weekend Roundup: May 18-24, 2013

This week on Opinio Juris, drone strikes unsurprisingly took center stage. In anticipation of President Obama’s speech, Jonathan Horowitz contributed a guest post on their human rights impact and Ken pointed to his new essay arguing the case for drone strikes. Deborah linked to the transcript of the speech here, and pointed to two things she liked about it. Deborah also discussed the White House Fact Sheet on Use of Force Procedures, and summed it all up with a post on what the newly released documents on targeted killing tell us compared to the leaked DOJ White Paper a few months ago. Kevin considered the requirement of “near certainty” of no civilian casualties a blatant lie that made him distrustful of all claims made in the speech.  He followed this up with a post outlining two problems with the “near certainty” standard and another arguing that the standards for the use of force in the fact sheet are a retreat from IHL. In a guest post Michael W. Lewis argued that Obama got it right. 

In other posts, Kevin posted a must-see link to a report visualizing international criminal justice and recommended an article by one of his students on the Kapo trials. 

We also revisited our discussion of Samantar, with Ingrid Wuerth’s guest post on foreign official immunity, and of the Philippines-China UNCLOS arbitration, with a post by Julian who wasn’t convinced by Professor Stefan Talmon’s argument that all of the Philippines’ claims against China fall outside of the tribunal’s jurisdiction. Julian also asked whether we should care about the upcoming hearings by the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on ratification of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

Speaking of international conventions, Duncan got inspired by Jennifer Lawrence to draft a petition to the White House to ratify the VCLTIO.

Finally, as always we provided you with a list of events and announcements and with weekday news wraps.

Many thanks to our guest contributors and have a nice weekend!