[Laurie Achtouk-Spivak is a member of the Bar in Paris and New York. She acts as counsel and advocate in investment treaty arbitrations before ICSID as well as other arbitration institutions. She teaches investor-State dispute settlement at the University of Poitiers. She also regularly publishes on investment treaty arbitration and is a member of the Peer Review Board of the...
Africa Sudan has accused a peacekeeping force in Darfur of killing seven civilians in three separate incidents last week, threatening to exacerbate the government's strained relations with the international mission. Nearly 15,000 Burundians have fled into Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo since mid-March, United Nations and Rwandan officials said on Friday, amid growing fears of violence in the run-up to...
Events The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (IHEID), International Law Department will hold a conference entitled "International Law and Time" in Geneva, Switzerland, from 12-13 June 2015. Registration for the conference is now open. For more information please visit the conference website or email lawconference@graduateinstitute.ch. A one-day conference entitled The European Convention on Human Rights and General International Law is...
The last two weeks of posts at Opinio Juris have seen several items from Julian, including on his favorite treaty reservation ever in the Hague Child Support Treaty and more on the HCST and the role of US states here. He also asked the burning question of whether the new “Bipartisan Trade Priorities and Accountability Act” violate the U.S. Constitution’s bicameralism and presentment...
At least according to Fionnuala Ní Aolain, criticising the counter-petition that I and hundreds of others signed in defense of Harold Koh. Her entire Just Security post is deeply problematic; let's go through it systematically. When asked to sign, I articulated a deep discomfort with the petition and the precedent it sets. I strongly believe that any academic should be able (as...
A new report entitled “Nuclear Weapons: the State of Play 2015” makes for very sober reading. The authors are Gareth Evans, Tanya Ogilvie-White and Ramesh Thakur, and the report was written for the upcoming NPT review conference. Gareth Evans is on a world-tour releasing the report, and yesterday I saw him at the International Peace Institute in New York. You can...
The NYTimes has a piece today on how Idaho's refusal to implement the Hague Child Support Treaty is causing problems for the U.S. and for Idaho as a whole. I hope to have more to say about this treaty later. For now, in looking at the treaty, I wanted to point readers to one of the more amusing U.S. treaty...
[Natia Kalandarishvili-Mueller is a Lecturer in Humanitarian Law at Tbilisi State University, Institute of International Law, Faculty of Law, and a PhD Candidate at the University of Essex, School of Law. The views expressed in the post are that of the author only.] Russia still occupies twenty percent of Georgian territory. On 24 November 2014, the Russian Federation and Abkhazia, one of...
Africa Sudan's President Omar Hassan al-Bashir will travel to Indonesia on Monday for a summit, Sudan's foreign ministry said, in his first trip outside of Africa or the Middle East in nearly four years. **UPDATE** Al-Bashir cancelled his trip to Indonesia, sources say, based on not receiving permission from several states to fly over their airspace en route to Jakarta. Two Kenyans...
Calls for Papers Call for papers for ‘The Latin American Challenge to the Current System of Investor-State Dispute Settlement’ will analyze current developments and the proposed design of UNASUR’s investment dispute settlement centre, as an example of the Latin American ‘challenge’ to investment arbitration and place it within the wider context of reform of investor-state dispute settlement as evidenced elsewhere in the ...
I am slammed with a couple of projects right now, but I can't help throwing this question out to the legal blogosphere. Does the new "Bipartisan Trade Priorities and Accountability Act" recently introduced by leading U.S. Senators violate the U.S. Constitution's bicameralism and presentment requirements as stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in INS v. Chadha? The BTPAA seems crucial as...
I'm one of them. Here is the text of the letter: To Whom It May Concern, A recent petition at NYU urges people to express "no confidence" in the Law School's invitation to Harold Hongju Koh to teach international human rights law this semester. We understand that this petition is motivated by Professor Koh's recent service as Legal Adviser to the U.S....
