In association with the International Commission of Jurists

October 2013

31 Oct

Dov Jacobs calls attention today to an ICTY press release announcing that the Acting President of the ICTY has assigned a new judge to the Seselj case, Mandiaye Niang, pursuant to Rule 15bis of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence. Here is the text of the rule, in relevant part (emphasis mine): (C) If a Judge is, for any reason, unable to...

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31 Oct

As foreign relations law wonks gear up for next Tuesday's argument in Bond v. United States, I wanted to ask, how did we end up with this case, anyway? The small-time, slightly sordid facts are (for classroom purposes) a lawprof's dream. For those of you who haven't been following along, the case involves a love triangle in which a wife...

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31 Oct

International lawyers here in New York are gearing up for ASIL’s mid-year Meeting.  The program is available here, which kicks off tonight with a reception and talk at the UN. I’m delighted to have co-chaired the Research Forum with Tim Meyer from Georgia this year.   Tim and I assembled a wonderful Research Forum Committee this year, who conducted a double-blind selection...

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31 Oct

[Muthucumaraswamy Sornarajah is the CJ Koh Professor of Law, National University of Singapore and a Visiting Professor, Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics.] Michael Goldhaber’s well-argued piece on the extent of the powers that investment arbitration tribunals are arrogating to themselves is evidence of a general malaise that afflicts investment arbitration. The arbitrators have assumed powers far in excess of what states intended them to have when they made investment treaties and created a unilateral power in the investor to arbitrate disputes. Consistent with prevailing ideas generated by the Washington Consensus and its desire to bring about standards of global governance, arbitrators promoting their own self-interest went on a rampage of expansionist interpretation of treaties. Goldhaber highlights one of the most glaring instances of this neoliberal expansionism, the making of interim orders restraining a respondent state from enforcing judgments of their domestic courts made in cases involving third parties. This phenomenon is but an aspect of a project to build up a neoliberal regime of inflexible investment protection. In the aspect of this project that Goldhaber describes, there has been an assiduous effort made by leading members of the “college of international lawyers”, entrusted the task of being bulwarks against injustice, promoting sectional interests of investors to the detriment of other values such as the protection of human rights and the environment. The downsizing of the notion of denial of justice so that it could accommodate lesser standards enabling easy review of domestic judicial orders is a definite project that arbitrators and “highly qualified publicists” embarked upon. Arbitrators, whose legal competence is not tested or uniform, embarked on a course of review of domestic decisions. Golhaber describes these processes with competence. As he points out, while purporting not to act as appellate courts, this is precisely what the tribunals were doing.
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31 Oct

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Middle East Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has said he is open to peace talks but insisted that they would not go ahead unless foreign nations stopped supporting rebel fighters. Reuters has an Insight about starvation being used in Syria as a "war tactic" and Foreign Policy offers a glimpse inside...

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30 Oct

[Anthea Roberts holds a joint appointment as a Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and a Senior Lecturer in Law at the London School of Economics and will be in residence at Columbia Law School from 2013-2015.] Michael Goldhaber has written an interesting and timely article charting the rise of international arbitrators exercising power over and with respect to domestic courts. He gives examples ranging from Chevron to Saipem to White Industries. This is an important and growing phenomenon that has not yet received adequate attention. I believe that the rise of arbitral power over domestic courts that Goldhaber describes is the first stage in what will ultimately become a longer and more contested saga about the respective powers of arbitral tribunals and domestic courts. That is because arbitral tribunals not only exercise power over domestic courts, but their own power is also dependent on domestic courts. The power of arbitral tribunals ultimately comes down to whether their decisions will be enforced by domestic courts. While Goldhaber charts the first stage in the battle between arbitral tribunals and domestic courts where arbitrators are in the position of authority, we are likely to witness a second stage when domestic courts are asked to pass judgment on whether arbitral tribunals have exceeded their jurisdiction or violated public policy by hearing these sorts of cases or ordering certain relief. Arbitral tribunals will sit in judgment of domestic courts and domestic courts will sit in judgment of arbitral tribunals. Neither reigns supreme. BG Group v Argentina represents an early example of this type of phenomenon. The tribunal in that case chose not to enforce the requirement in the treaty that the investor resort to the domestic courts for 18 months prior to bringing an arbitral claim. Many other tribunals adopted the same approach, often painting the issue as one of admissibility rather than jurisdiction or viewing domestic remedies as futile rendering resort to them unnecessary. But when the Court of Appeals for the District Court of Columbia was asked to enforce the resulting award, it refused to do so on the basis that the tribunal had exceeded its jurisdiction because Argentina had only consented to arbitration on certain conditions, one of which was not met.
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30 Oct

[Prof. Dr. Anne van Aaken is Professor of Law and Economics, Legal Theory, Public International Law and European Law at the University of Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.] I am delighted that Tomer Broude commented on Opinio Juris on the potential and the pitfalls of the use of behavioral economics in international law and am equally happy that I am able to follow up on this. I will do so in two steps: the first part will address the benchmark against which Behavioral International Law and Economics (BIntLE) should be measured in my view. The second mentions some of the applications I suggest in my paper and in an earlier article. Tomer and I are currently planning a book together, bringing together the insights of both of our papers and extending them considerably. In his introduction to the topic, Tomer comments on the relationship of “Behavioral International Law” to rational choice approaches in international law and international relations. Behavioral Economics is an empirically validated theory about human behavior. There are of course competing theories in social science. The psychological research is not free-floating and it is not used as such in the field of international law and international relations. Tomer suggests as a basis from which to depart sociological approaches. Sociology as such does not have a unified behavioral model, thus one would need to clarify which sociological theories are drawn upon (e.g. the homo sociologicus as advanced by Ralf Dahrendorf (micro theory of individual behavior), system theory (macro theory), etc.). I suggest as a benchmark rational choice theory, for two reasons.  First, the psychological insights we use are commonly named behavioral economics, given that this research tests and challenges the rational choice hypothesis to a hitherto unknown extent (and the psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel prize in economics). But behavioral economics is not yet at a stage where it has a unified behavioral theory replacing rational choice: many heuristics and biases depend on the decision-making context (those have to be studied carefully). Rational choice is still the benchmark against which the insights are measured. Second, the parsimony of rational choice makes it a natural starting point. Since behavioral research adds complexity (something which every academic should try to avoid if a simpler explanation is possible for answering a certain research question), it has to show that it generates better insights and is able to explain phenomena which cannot be explained drawing on the rational choice approach alone. To use a coin minted by Einstein: “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.” A rational choice approach might sometimes be too simple. Tomer and I share the belief that behavioral economics is able to generate more and better insights to the functioning of international law and we share also the deliberations on the methodological problems this might generate. Because of the weight I put on parsimony, I shift the burden of proof on BintLE to show that it might generate better insights than a rational choice approach to international law. This has to be done step by step, analyzing different fields of general and special international law. After all, it will be the empirics which will validate (or not) the research hypotheses advanced by any theory: the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Having said that, let me turn to some promising insights, adding to Tomer´s suggestions in his paper and his post.
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29 Oct

Josh Gerstein has this interesting piece at Politico on how the citizenship divide is breaking down as a defensible perimeter in the legal justification of electronic surveillance. It's clear where the old reflex is coming from: lawyers steeped in a constitutional tradition that distinguishes citizens from foreigners (and US territory from foreign territory) in the application of constitutional rights. (The...

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29 Oct

[Christoph Schreuer is a Professor at the Department of European, International Law and Comparative Law, University of Vienna]  Michael Goldhaber’s erudite and well-researched article examines an important aspect of the many-sided relationship between domestic courts and investment tribunals. Other facets of this diverse relationship include the review of arbitral awards by domestic courts, anti-suit injunctions by domestic courts, the need to pursue remedies in domestic courts prior to international arbitration, the division of competences under the label of treaty claims and contract claims, fork in the road provisions, interim measures by domestic courts in support of arbitration and enforcement of awards by domestic courts. This complex relationship of courts and tribunals shows elements of competition, of obstruction, of mutual control and of support. It is startling and paradoxical because it defies any notion of a hierarchy of decision makers. Goldhaber’s excellent analysis concentrates on two issues: antisuit injunctions by arbitral tribunals and denial of justice by domestic courts. But the potential for infringements of the international rules on investor protection by domestic courts is much wider. Practically each of the typical standards of protection contained in BITs can be violated by domestic courts and each of these violations is subject to the scrutiny of investment tribunals. From the perspective of international law, an international review of domestic court decisions is neither new nor unusual. International judicial control over State activity has always included courts. The State’s responsibility for all types of the exercise of public authority is uncontested and is reflected in Article 4 of the ILC’s Articles on State responsibility.[1] There are good reasons for not differentiating between the different branches of government when it comes to State responsibility. This lack of differentiation is not merely designed to prevent states from hiding behind ‛independent’ organs. In real life the courts and other elements of the government interact in a way that defies the application of a separation of powers doctrine to questions of State responsibility. For example, court action to the detriment of foreign investors is often mandated by legislation.[2] Decisions of domestic courts are sometimes prompted by executive insinuations.[3]
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29 Oct

I refer, of course, to the British Navy's use of the music of Britney Spears to scare off Somali pirates: In an excellent case of "here's a sentence you won't read every day", Britney Spears has emerged as an unlikely figurehead in the fight against Somali pirates. According to reports, Britney's hits, including Oops! I Did It Again and Baby One More Time, are being employed by...

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28 Oct

[Sean D. Murphy is the Patricia Roberts Harris Research Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School. He is a member of the United Nations' International Law Commission.] For the next two weeks, the Sixth Committee of the U.N. General Assembly will be debating the Annual Report of the International Law Commission, covering its 65th session in Geneva held...

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