In association with the International Commission of Jurists

May 2014

14 May

[John Ohnesorge is currently Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School .] This post is part of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics Vol. 46, No. 1 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. I completely agree with Professor Kroncke that the world of law and development, both scholarship and...

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13 May

Last week saw a set of posts, across the law-and-security blogs, about whether an armed conflict existed at the time current commission defendant Abd Al Rahim Hussayn Muhammad Al Nashiri was allegedly involved in planning the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. See, e.g., Frakt, Vladeck, Heller, and Margulies. While I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, after reading the posts, I find myself disagreeing (at least in part) with pretty much all of my friends on the question of who can/must decide the answer to the existence-of-armed-conflict question. Here’s my thinking.
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13 May

[Eva Pils is currently Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law and a Non-resident Senior Research Fellow at NYU Law School’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute. Her scholarship focuses on human rights in China, with publications addressing Chinese human rights lawyers, property law and land rights in China, the status of migrant workers, the Chinese petitioning system,...

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13 May

[Cynthia Estlund is currently Catherine A. Rein Professor a NYU School of Law] This post is part of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics Vol. 46, No. 1 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. Jed Kroncke explores a fascinating contrast within US policy toward China and other developing countries: That policy couples...

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13 May

This post is part of the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics Vol. 46, No. 1 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. The NYU Journal of International Law and Politics is proud to be partnering with Opinio Juris once again for an online symposium. This symposium is a discussion of Professor Jedidiah J. Kroncke’s article Property Rights, Labor Rights and Democratization: Lessons From China and Experimental Authoritarians, which was published in the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Volume 46, issue No. 1. In this article, Professor Kroncke argues that a fundamental paradox exists in efforts to promote democratization abroad that emphasize property rights to the exclusion of labor rights and that this paradox emerges from the connection between property rights and foreign legal development alongside a renewed emphasis on independent unionization in democratization theory. The Article explores the paradox in action through the willingness of modern authoritarian regimes, particularly China, to experiment with rule of law reforms, and creatively so in the realm of property rights, while being uniformly repressive of associative labor rights. Over the next two days, a number of legal scholars will offer their thoughts on the topic, including: Tuesday, May 13, 2014:
  • Cynthia Estlund – New York University School of Law
  • Eva Pils – Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law
Wednesday, May 14, 2014: Below is an introduction to the symposium by Professor Jedidiah Kroncke: I want to open by thanking the editors at NYU JILP for their efforts in organizing this symposium and Opinio Juris for hosting. I am also very thankful for the opportunity to have scholars whose work I regard highly subject the article to critical scrutiny. As I look forward to the commentators’ engagement with the paper’s substantive claims, I thought I would give a simple preface to make explicit some of the methodological motivations that shape the piece. Much of my work to date has focused on the historical evolution of comparative law in the US, specifically through its relationship to China and the field popularly known as law and development. I believe that the distinction between these two fields is inherently illusory and counterproductive, especially when such distinction artificially segregates the study of certain foreign legal systems from others and in doing so presumes a certain common sense about from where and to where legal knowledge flows globally. Further, I see it as a categorical error that the monadic study of foreign legal systems is de facto labeled “comparative law” when it is not analytically comparative or, worse, implicitly employs an uncritical view of US or “Western” law.
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12 May

[Naz Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Project at Harvard Law School. This post is written in her personal capacity and does not represent the views of the CHE Project]  Part 1 can be found here. Humanitarian Concerns Perhaps as significant as the legal errors in the letter, the authors seem to take no account of the security implications of their recommendation....

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12 May

[Naz Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Project at Harvard Law School. This post is written in her personal capacity and does not represent the views of the CHE Project]  There is no shortage of profound questions arising out of the armed conflict in Syria. Yet whether the reported United Nations legal analysis concluding that the UN needs the consent of the Syrian authorities before it can undertake humanitarian relief actions on Syrian territory is not one of them. As international law questions go, this one is relatively straightforward: Absent a sufficient Security Council decision authorizing intervention—a decision which has not been forthcoming, at least not yet—UN system bodies, funds, programmes, and specialized agencies need to obtain the consent of the Syria authorities before undertaking relief actions on Syrian territory. You would be forgiven for being confused about whether there is a contested legal issue at stake if you had read the open letter sent on April 28th from 35 eminent legal experts (repeatedly referred to as “top international lawyers” in the press and in an increasingly loud Twitter campaign) to the UN Secretary General, Under Secretary General Valerie Amos, and the heads of the five UN humanitarian agencies. US Senator Tim Kaine (who sponsored the Syrian Humanitarian Resolution of 2014) quickly capitalized on the letter and the caliber of its signatories, sending a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon stating that “continued inaction will only undermine the legitimacy and reputation of the UN.” The Senator noted that while he supports a Chapter VII decision, he believes that “the UN already has the authority to act.” He states,
“Based on the opinion of prominent international lawyers, the UN currently has the mandate and legal authority to organize a large coalition of international NGOs poised to deliver humanitarian aid to all areas of Syria. Anything short implies complicity with the Syrian government’s continued violations of the basic principles of international law, and is shameful.”
Strong words—and ones that raise the question of whether the prominent international lawyers who signed the letter anticipated being implicated in the suggestion that the UN’s failure to essentially run the Syrian border against the government’s explicit denial of consent suggests “complicity with the Syrian government’s continued violations.” There are many actors with blood on their hands in the generational tragedy unfolding in Syria. In my view, the women and men of the UN’s humanitarian agencies are not on that list. In this post, I would like to provide a close initial read of the letter (whose arguments have been quickly amplified by an advocacy and media campaigns). My sense is that this is a political argument dressed up in the language of IHL.
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12 May

As my correspondent Victoria Ferauge points out in response to last week's post on inter-governmental agreements implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, the problem with FATCA for expatriate Americans is not so much the prospect of added accountant fees in tax preparation. It's the prospect of being discriminated against as an American for all things financial. Faced with their own accounting...

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12 May

The state of the international law academy in the United States is undoubtedly strong.  International law and its progeny are no longer marginalized pieces of the law school curriculum as they were for much of the 20th century.  U.S. Law Schools regularly offer international law, with a fair number now doing so in the first year (whether as a required...

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12 May

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Boko Haram has released a new video claiming to show the missing Nigerian schoolgirls who were abducted last month, alleging they had converted to Islam and would not be released until all of its prisoners held by Nigeria were freed. Israel offered Nigeria help in locating 200 schoolgirls abducted...

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11 May

Events Sociological Inquires into International Law” (LSE, May 16-17, 2014) is a workshop with the aim of bringing contemporary international law scholarship into a closer conversation with a number of inspiring and theoretically rich literatures on law and markets deriving from traditions of thinking within sociology and anthropology.  We are convinced that, particularly within the field of international economic law, a deeper...

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