The Faroe Islands has announced it has filed a referred the European Union to arbitration under the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea. Apparently, it is a dispute over herring. “The Faroe Islands have today referred the use of threats of coercive economic measures by the European Union, in relation to the Atlanto-Scandian herring, to an arbitral tribunal under...
[Laura Salvadego is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Law, University of Ferrara. This work has been developed during a research stay at the New York University School of Law - Center for Research in Crime and Justice, funded by Unicredit bank and by 5 per thousand contributions given to the University of Ferrara in 2010] The need to ensure...
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday he was "deeply disturbed" by the deaths in custody of 37 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and condemned an ambush by Islamist militants that killed 25 Egyptian policemen. A leading diplomat from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. ambassador to Syria will meet with a Russian delegation in The Hague next week to...
Criticism of the specific-direction requirement endorsed by the ICTY Appeals Chamber in Perišić has officially jumped the shark. According to James Stewart, the requirement would have required the British military court in Hamburg to acquit the two German businessmen who provided the Zyklon-B that the SS used to gas Jews in the death camps: In any event, let’s assume that specific direction...
[Tamsin Paige is an M.Phil (Law) Candidate at the Australian National University College of Law] Piracy originating from the coast of Somalia hit its peak in 2011, with 236 attacks occurring in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and the Somali region of the Indian Ocean in that year, according to the IMB’s 2012 piracy report. So far in 2013 the IMB...
British authorities used anti-terrorism powers yesterday to detain Glenn Grenwald's partner (Greenwald is the journalist with close links to Edward Snowden, the former U.S. spy agency contractor who has been granted asylum by Russia), as he passed through London's Heathrow airport. Greenwald's reaction is here, calling the incident "a failed attempt at intimidation.' A defense lawyer who gained rare access to...
Announcements A prize has been established by the Society of International Economic Law and Cambridge University Press for the best essay submitted on any topic in any field of international economic law. The competition is open to all current undergraduate and graduate students of any university or other tertiary education institution, and those who have graduated from a university or other tertiary education institution no earlier than...
It's been quite a month for the mainstream media. First, at FP.com, Elias Groll completely misstated the mens rea of the Espionage Act and refused to correct his mistake. (He obviously reads my tweets, because he re-tweeted a criticism I offered of a different article.) Then, at the Guardian, Owen Bowcott misrepresented the specific-direction requirement, eliding the distinction between aiding...
This week on Opinio Juris, Kevin welcomed the new international criminal law blog Beyond The Hague to the blogosphere and sparked much debate with his post based on Judge Harhoff's recent comments about the ICTY Appeals Chamber's Perisic adoption of the specific-direction requirement and followed-up with a second post on the topic clarifying what the specific-direction requirement entails. Kevin also questioned the latest in...
Just when I thought its position couldn't get more ridiculous, Libya argues the following -- presumably with a straight face -- in response to the defence's complaint that it is violating its obligation to surrender Saif to the ICC: It is clear, as Mr. Gaddafi noted in the Request, that the issue of admissibility – in particular ability to pursue a domestic...
[Elizabeth Holland is an attorney with the law firm Foley Hoag LLP, where she focuses on international law and corporate social responsibility. The views expressed here are her own.] There is clear need for effective counterterrorism measures. Equally compelling is the humanitarian imperative to address civilian need in situations of armed conflict. It has been questioned, however, whether the balance struck...
I've spent a lot of time thinking about treaties. And I've read lots and lots of them over the years. From time to time, however, I encounter something I find truly novel on the treaty front. A case in point, was this story in IT World yesterday. It refers to pending negotiations between the United States and Germany on an agreement...
