This fortnight on Opinio Juris, Deborah reminisced about her handshake with Nelson Mandela during her time as a junior White House staffer and Roger posted about the day Mandela was free. Mandela's example was invoked at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Bali, where trade ministers reached their first trade agreement in years. Julian argued that the WTO however does not need the Bali Package...
Not long ago, Amnesty International released an updated version of its massive study "Universal Jursidiction: A Preliminary Survey of Legislation Around the World." The report concluded, inter alia, that 86% of the world's states exercise universal jurisdiction over at least one kind of international crime. (Most commonly, war crimes.) In a post today at Just Security, my friend and regular sparring...
Most reporting on the nuclear agreement with Iran has tended to generalize about the types of sanctions and the impact of the deal on these various measures, so it would be easy to assume that United Nations sanctions are being eased or lifted, but this is not the case. The deal primarily eases unilateral sanctions by the United States and...
Novelists such as H.G. Wells and George Orwell used fantastic fiction to describe their world as it was and to imagine, to use Wells' title, "The Shape of Things to Come." This past summer I wrote a post on what current science fiction can bring to international law. I mentioned various books that, though fantastic, illuminated topics related to international...
A nice light-hearted exchange at today's U.S. State Department media briefing, which shows some folks in government like Jen Psaki still have a sense of humor. Reporter: “So has the U.S. already issued a visa to Santa?” Psaki: Santa does not need a visa. He has a visa waiver in the United States. (Laughter.) So he can get to every house, and...
I had the pleasure of participating in a very interesting discussion yesterday of Argentina's debt litigation at the Cato Institute in Washington D.C. Richard Samp offered a useful overview of this litigation, and my own talk focused on the strange (and in my view inappropriate) way that the U.S. legal system allows sovereigns to waive immunity from courts, but continues to...
As the political crisis in Ukraine over the government’s decision not to sign an Association Agreement with the EU passes its second week, this conflict and the positioning over other Russian “Near Abroad” countries (especially Armenia, Moldova, and Georgia) are good examples of the interrelationship of norms and geopolitical strategy. The situation has been largely described in terms of Putin’s reaction to...
The drive from Paarl to Cape Town was only forty-five minutes. The plan was for Nelson Mandela to address the world at the Grand Parade, the great public square adjacent to the Fort of Good Hope, where South Africa’s founding father Jan van Riebeck had established a toehold for the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century. ...
I love Canada, and I have long been intrigued by plans to unite the U.S. and Canada in deeper political and economic integration (See this post from 2005(!)). So I have been excited to see the idea getting some mainstream media love with discussions of Diane Francis's new book Merger of the Century: Why the U.S. and Canada Should Become One...
Simon Lester of the IELP Blog raises an interesting and possibly important point about the new WTO Agreement just reached in Bali. In order for the U.S. to enter into the agreement, will the U.S. Congress have to approve it? On first glance, the answer would seem to be: "yes" since the U.S. Congress invariably is required to approve all U.S....
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Middle East The UN General Assembly has elected Jordan to the Security Council to replace Saudi Arabia, which had rejected the seat in an unprecedented act to protest the council's failure to end the Syrian and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Syria's Bashar al-Assad will remain president and lead any transition agreed...
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the U.S. government agency that regulates offshore fishing, has proposed a new set of regulations to reduce bycatch of Bluefin tuna by economic disincentive. The Washington Post reports that: “Under the proposal, the NMFS would sharply cut back the number of bluefin tuna that individual fishing vessels are allowed to capture accidentally, setting a quota...
