I've been working hard this break teaching in Hofstra's winter program in Curacao. But I couldn't resist stepping away from the beach and posting on the India-US flap over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York. Dapo Akande at EJIL Talk! has two great posts on the consular and diplomatic immunity legal issues. I have nothing to add,...
Train wreck, fiasco, disaster, dumpster fire, bad joke, kangaroo court, show trial -- take your pick, the description applies. Eviatar's post at Just Security a while back is a must-read; here is but one particularly disturbing snippet: Recent pre-trial hearings have revealed, for example, that the Guantanamo courtroom was equipped with microphones able to eavesdrop on privileged attorney-client communications; that the CIA...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa More than 1000 people have died in fighting in South Sudan in the past month, where a political crisis is turning into a tribal conflict. Zimbabwe's ambassador to Australia has requested asylum there a few days before her term was due to end. Americas Edward Snowden has declared "mission accomplished" and also issued...
John Sexton, the controversial President of NYU, has spoken out against the American Studies Association's much-debated resolution in favour of boycotting Israeli universities. Here is his statement, issued jointly with NYU's provost: We write on behalf of New York University to express our disappointment, disagreement, and opposition to the boycott advocated by your organization of Israeli academics and academic institutions. This boycott...
At long last, Amnesty has weighed in on the debate between me and Ryan about its methodology for determining whether a state exercises universal jurisdiction over at least one international crime. As I expected, and contrary to Ryan's claim, Amnesty does not consider it sufficient for a state to have incorporated the Rome Statute into its domestic legislation. On the...
Citizenship practice and policy is mostly below the news radar; change is slow; and the field tends not to be reported in any sort of integrated way. So here are the key threads from 2013 and how they might spin out in 2014. 1. Citizenship is not priceless. A growing number of states are selling citizenship. Malta is the latest. EU...
I have posted a new essay on SSRN entitled -- borrowing a phrase from a dissent written by Judge Van den Wyngaert -- "A Stick to Hit the Accused with": The Legal Recharacterization of Facts Under Regulation 55. The essay is forthcoming in a book on the ICC that Carsten Stahn is editing for OUP. Here is the abstract: Regulation 55 was...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Middle East British and U.S. spies targeted a senior EU official, German government buildings, and the office of an Israeli prime minister, according to the latest leaked documents from Edward Snowden published on Friday. Israeli officials said they were not surprised by allegations of spying and played down the...
Calls for Papers The Stanford Journal of International Law seeks contributions by academics, practitioners, and policymakers for its Symposium titled Governing Intelligence: Transnational Threats & the National Security State, which will take place on May 2, 2014 at Stanford Law School. Governing Intelligence will move beyond the surveillance debate to start an interdisciplinary dialogue about the power and limits of intelligence agencies from a comparative and international perspective. Contributions must address either of the...
British artist Banksy knocks it out of the park again, with a rather unusual rendering of a Nativity scene: As ArtInfo notes, this is not Banksy's first comment on the Israel/Palestine conflict. He painted nine amazing murals directly on the wall in 2005, including a boy drawing a chalk ladder over the wall and a girl floating over the wall with...
That's the punchline of a podcast Radiolab just released this week, provocatively titled "Sex, Ducks and The Founding Feud". Along with John Bellinger, Joseph Ellis and Nick Rosenkranz, I was interviewed for the story by Jad Abumrad and Kelsey Padgett. It was a fun experience overall trying to explain to a general audience the importance of the US treaty power and how...
This week Kevin briefly turned the blog into The Onion Juris with his satirical ICTY press release, after the Court, in Kevin's opinion, nailed the final nail in the coffin of its legitimacy. In a guest post, Eugene Kontorovich framed the question as a design choice in terms of who should bear the risk when a judge becomes unavailable before a trial has...
