No, I’m not talking about how to do ubiquitous surveillance. Rather, I’m talking about how to take the product of massive video surveillance and turn it into, ahem, Art. (Well, maybe that’s only a small-a “art.”) Anyway, let’s say you’re an unsigned band from Manchester, England, and you want to make a video. You could hire some hip upstart video director, hire some models as extras, rent video cameras, lighting, props, etc. Or, well, you could just do this:

Unable to afford a proper camera crew and equipment, The Get Out Clause, an unsigned band from the city, decided to make use of the cameras seen all over British streets.

With an estimated 13 million CCTV [closed circuit television] cameras in Britain, suitable locations were not hard to come by.

They set up their equipment, drum kit and all, in eighty locations around Manchester – including on a bus – and proceeded to play to the cameras.

Afterwards they wrote to the companies or organisations involved and asked for the footage under the Freedom of Information Act.

Those cheeky Brits. It seems that they are part of a broader group of artists using CCTV.  I guess the revolution will be televised, after all.  See the video after the jump:

Adding to the fortune-telling articles concerning the policies of the incoming Obama Adminstration, the Wall Street Journal states that the current adminsitration’s policies will go through the transition “largely intact.”  However, I think it is just too early to tell. The WSJ article begins…

In his recent post, Julian wrote that the secret U.S. military raids in Syria, Pakistan, and other countries may be (in his view) easily justifiable under U.S. law, but that the issue of legality

is much harder to answer as a matter of international law - indeed, it would have to be some theory of preemptive self-defense. Expect to see denunciations of these raids from international lawyers in the next few days, as well as from foreign governments on the list of countries named in the order.

I think Marko Milanovic and other commentors have done a good job looking at the international legal problems. For an argument concerning whether international law is evolving regarding the use of force in counter-terrorism activities, I would recommend Jose Alvarez’s Hegemonic International Law Revisited, 97 American Journal of International Law 873 (2003).

Moreover, for further perspective on the domestic legal and policy issues concerning anticipatory self-defense, I want to point to a recent op-ed in the Arizona Republic by Amos Guiora (a former Israeli Defense Force Lieutenant Colonel and a law professor) and Daniel C. Barr (a U.S. lawyer).  As I had mentioned in an earlier post, Guiora has been grappling in his scholarship with the issue of legal regulation of anticipatory self-defense both under U.S. and international law; this op-ed tries to rescue the idea of anticipatory self-defense from the excesses of the Bush Administration and argues for requiring participation of the other branches in decision-making. They wrote, in part…

This past September, I was a speaker at a conference on Law, Ethics and the War on Terror that was organized by Geoff Corn at the South Texas College of Law. The conference is now available as a video-stream. Part one is here and part two is here. The other panelists were incredibly impressive including senior military officials, prominent defense attorneys, and academics whom I admire. Their bios are available here. (This is the first conference I have attended where one of the other panelists is a graduate of Top Gun.) I learned a great deal at this symposium and, although (as far as I can tell) you cannot fast forward through the videos, I highly recommend watching them if you have the time.

As for what is on each video: part one includes the morning panel, “The Criminal Prosecution of Terrorists”, which has presentations by Jeanne Baker (“Terrorism” Is a Crime So Heinous That Even Innocence Is No Defense); Bobby Chesney (Terrorism and the Utility of Federal Criminal Prosecution); Col. Lawrence J. Morris (They Would Have Invented It: The Historical, Constitutional, and Practical Case for Military Commissions);Geoff Corn, Lt. Col. (ret.) (Have We Targeted the Offenses or the Defendants?); and Michael Lewis (The Military Costs and Benefits of a Criminal).The Q&A was moderated by Victor M. Hansen, Lt. Col. (ret.).

This is followed by the morning keynote by Fred L. Borch, Col. (ret.), who spoke on “The Historical Role of Military Lawyers in National Security Trials.”

The second video stream begins with the afternoon keynote, “The Ethical Dimension of National Security Legal Advice,” an address given by Maj. Gen. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr.

This is followed by the afternoon panel (on which I spoke): “Has the United States Lost the Ethical High Ground in the War on Terror?” The panelists in order of presentation were John Hutson, Vice Adm. (ret.) (How America Could Actually Lose the War on Terror); Amos N. Guiora, Lt. Col. (ret.) (Freedom of Religion–Freedom from Religion); Richard Jackson, Col. (ret.) (Law of War in GWOT–Regaining the Moral High Ground); me (Hearts and Minds and Laws: Legal Compliance and Diplomatic Persuasion); and Eugene R. Fidell (The High Ground and the National Narrative). The Q&A was moderated by Walt Huffman, Maj. Gen. (ret.).

Those of us in the U.S. are off to the polls, so I thought we could try doing an open thread today for comments and suggestions to the new President, whoever that is, concerning America’s foreign policy, with a particular emphasis on international law.  Obviously there has been alot of talk about getting out of Iraq, putting a definitive end to torture and/or closing Guantanamo.  What else should the new Administration be thinking about in regards to international law? What advice do our readers/ bloggers have?

I’ll start things off with the first comment…

Today is Halloween in the U.S. and some kids will be going door to door dressed as norm entrepreneurs. Not that they will be dressed up as Nobel laureates (though some may…) but rather that many kids throughout the U.S. will take pasrt in reverse trick or treating, a project to increase awareness among Americans of forced child labor on many of the farms that provide cocoa to large chocolate manufacturers.

Kids participating in reverse trick or treating will distribute information cards about child labor in the cocoa industry at the houses they visit.  They will even give out samples of Fair Trade Certified chocolates. Hopefully, this project will not only educate the public but also help spur a shift to purchasing chocolate products that are not the result of abusive labor practices. The goal is to reach 250,000 households by the end of today.

I hope it works but I fully realize how difficult the process of norm diffusion can be. Because, although my kids (dressed as Asokha from the Clone Wars and the White Power Ranger) will be handing out Fair Trade cards and chocolate samples, in writing this I realize that I will be giving out some candy at home that has been made by the usual corporate suspects (as well as organic lollipops and pretzels, which have not).  I guess norm internalization must begin at home.

Francis Fukuyama, one of the leading intellectual lights of American conservatism, has endorsed Barack Obama in a short essay in the (aptly titled) magazine The American Conservative: 

I’m voting for Barack Obama this November for a very simple reason. It is hard to imagine a more disastrous presidency than that of George W. Bush. It was bad enough that he launched an unnecessary war and undermined the standing of the United States throughout the world in his first term. But in the waning days of his administration, he is presiding over a collapse of the American financial system and broader economy that will have consequences for years to come. As a general rule, democracies don’t work well if voters do not hold political parties accountable for failure. While John McCain is trying desperately to pretend that he never had anything to do with the Republican Party, I think it would a travesty to reward the Republicans for failure on such a grand scale.

McCain’s appeal was always that he could think for himself, but as the campaign has progressed, he has seemed simply erratic and hotheaded…

America has been living in a dream world for the past few years, losing its basic values of thrift and prudence and living far beyond its means, even as it has lectured the rest of the world to follow its model. At a time when the U.S. government has just nationalized a good part of the banking sector, we need to rethink a lot of the Reaganite verities of the past generation regarding taxes and regulation. Important as they were back in the 1980s and ’90s, they just won’t cut it for the period we are now entering. Obama is much better positioned to reinvent the American model and will certainly present a very different and more positive face of America to the rest of the world.

Hat tip: The Huffington Post

In honor of Ken, I wanted to post a quick heads-up to this post by Tom James at Futurismic, which has the excellent title “I, For One, Welcome Our New Robodog Overlords.”  Money quote:

According to Prof Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University:

“What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.

We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”

I don’t have a Stendahl quote for this, so I’ll close with the opening from William Gibson’s Count Zero, a sci-fi novel from twenty years ago which may prove all-too-prescient in this instance:

They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and flaked TNT.

He didn’t see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco facade of a place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.

[I have no idea what recrystallized hexogene is, but it sure sounds nasty.]

Career diplomat Nicholas Burns has an essay in Newsweek on the whole “negotiate with adversaries” kerfuffle. (Yeah, I said “kerfuffle” because that’s about all it deserves.) He begins:

One of the sharpest and most telling differences on foreign policy between Barack Obama and John McCain is whether the United States should talk to difficult and disreputable leaders like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. In each of the three presidential debates, McCain belittled Obama as naive for arguing that America should be willing to negotiate with such adversaries. In the vice presidential debate, Sarah Palin went even further, accusing Obama of “bad judgment … that is dangerous,” an ironic charge given her own very modest foreign-policy credentials.

Are McCain and Palin correct that America should stonewall its foes? I lived this issue for 27 years as a career diplomat, serving both Republican and Democratic administrations. Maybe that’s why I’ve been struggling to find the real wisdom and logic in this Republican assault against Obama. I’ll bet that a poll of senior diplomats who have served presidents from Carter to Bush would reveal an overwhelming majority who agree with the following position: of course we should talk to difficult adversaries—when it is in our interest and at a time of our choosing.

The more challenging and pertinent question, especially for the McCain-Palin ticket, is the reverse: Is it really smart to declare we will never talk to such leaders?

Continue reading after the jump…

Last week the ICJ issued an order for provisional measures  (pdf is here) in the Case Concerning Application of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (Georgia v. Russian Federation) . This case, along with the recent referral to the ICJ for an advisory opinion on the status of Kosovo, are the latest cases arising out of secessionist conflicts that have come to the ICJ docket. Both cases present complex facts and will not only be important regarding the evolving jurisprudence and state practice concerning secession and self determination, but will also be important markers concerning the strengths and weaknesses of the ICJ.

The ICJ will have to also navigate between its desire for relevance and the risk of overstepping its mandate. It will not be an easy task…

I don’t even know where to begin with this one. I’ll let the BBC tell the story:

Comic actor Bolek Polivka is suing former business partner Tomas Harabis over the rights to the fictitious Wallachian Kingdom.

The [Czech] court must decide whether Mr Polivka is the true “king” of the fairy-tale realm…

Wallachia, as Tomas says, is real.

It is a mountainous region in the south-east corner of Moravia about the size of Luxembourg. It was settled over many centuries by migrating Romanian shepherds called Vlachs, herding their sheep westwards along the mighty Carpathian mountain range.

The Wallachian Kingdom is not real. It was founded by Tomas and a couple of friends as an elaborate practical joke.

But as practical jokes go, it has become very serious…

Following up on Peter’s earlier post on the foreign policy views of Sarah Palin, I note this letter that she wrote in September 2007 to Senators Stevens and Murkowski expressing her “strong support” for the ratification of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). She also seems to advocate the use of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS)  the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. [UPDATE: Thanks to John Noyes for his informative comment below which corrects my original supposition.]

Her support for UNCLOS seems to be primarily related to furthering U.S. oil and mineral claims in the Arctic Ocean:

If the U.S. does not ratify the convention, the opportunity to pursue our own claims to offshore areas in the Arctic Ocean might well be lost.

As a consequence, our rightful claims to hydrocarbons, minerals, and other natural resources could be ignored.

Governor Palin then writes in a later section:

However, as you know, ratification has been thwarted by a small group of senators concerned about the perceived loss of U.S. sovereignty. I believe quite the contrary is the case. If the U.S. does not ratify the convention, we will be denied access to the forum established by the international community to adjudicate claims to submerged lands in the arctic.

If I read this correctly…

[UPDATE #2: This post over at the Washington Note focuses on John McCain's flip-flopping on UNCLOS and even includes an image capture of the questionairre he answered for the Iowa Christian Alliance in which he originally checked the space for "support" for the Law of the Sea Convention, then crossed it out and checked the space for "oppose." Hat tip: John Boonstra of UN Dispatch.]

By a vote of 77 for, 6 against, and 74 abstaining, the UN General Assembly has referred to the ICJ the following question:

Is the unilateral declaration of independence by the Provisional Institutions of Self-Government of Kosovo in accordance with international law?

The draft resolution submitted by Serbia is here.

According to the BBC, the US voted against the resolution, arguing that it was more political than legal, and most of the EU abstained.

I will post some preliminary thoughts on this later today.

Two weeks ago I was in Houston for a conference at South Texas College of Law organized by Geoff Corn entitled Law, Ethics and the War on Terror (more on that in another post). While there I had the pleasure of meeting Amos Guiora. As many readers of this blog probably know, Amos teaches at S.J. Quinney College of Law, is a former lieutenant colonel in the Israeli Defense Force JAG Corps and blogs at National Security Advisors.

So, I am happy to note that Amos recently posted a new article on SSRN, Anticipatory Self-Defence and International Law - A Re-Evaluation. The article is published by the Journal of Conflict & Security Law. The abstract is as follows:

Traditional state v. state war is largely a relic. How then does a nation-state defend itself—preemptively—against an unseen enemy? Existing international law—the Caroline Doctrine, UN Charter Article 51, Security Council Resolutions 1368 and 1373—do not provide sufficiently clear guidelines regarding when a state may take preemptive or anticipatory action against a non-state actor. This article proposes rearticulating international law to allow a state to act earlier provided sufficient intelligence is available. After examining international law this article proposes a process-based “strict-scrutiny” approach to self-defense. Under this approach, the executive will have to convince a court, based on relevant, reliable, viable and corroborated intelligence, that preemptive action is appropriate. This process leads to a check on the power of the executive by placing a judicial check on preemptive action, consequently establishing objective legal criteria for operational counterterrorism.

Moreover, a couple of responses to this piece are also available on-line (subscription required to download these essays):

Muge Kinacioglu (Department of International Relations, Bilkent University, Turkey), A Response to Amos Guiora: Reassessing the Parameters of Use of Force in the Age of Terrorism: Pre-emptive Action and International Law.

Tarcisio Gazzini (Faculty of Law, VU University, Amsterdam), A Response to Amos Guiora’s Article on Pre-Emptive Self-Defence Against Non-State Actors.

I think Amos’ article will be somewhat controversial to both the political Left and the Right: to the Left, for his defense of a conception of anticipatory self-defense and to the Right for his view that such decisions cannot be left to the Executive alone but should have a judicial check to avoid abuse of power. Controversial or not, this is a thought-provoking article that is well worth the read.

On behalf of all of us at Opinio Juris I would like to thank Tom Farer for joining us this week in the first Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris book symposium to discuss his new book Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy.

We would also like to thank Kristen Boon and Mark Shulman for joining us as guest commentors. And, of course, thank you to everyone who posted comments, questions, and critiques. We hope you found the discussion interesting and useful.

For the next OUP/ Opinio Juris book discussion, Mary Ellen O’Connell will join us as we consider her new book, The Power and Purpose of International Law. 

We will post the details soon.

In his opening post and in the opening chapter of his book, Tom Farer gives us a tour of the horizon of how international law and self-interest interact in American foreign policy thinking. He paints a picture which focuses on a struggle between two different views of America’s role in the world, the Liberal view and the Neocon view.

In this opening post, I want to press Tom on his use of this dichotomy and ask if the story here is really one of Liberals versus Neocons or rather a more complex picture where there is a cross-hatching of aims, means, and political preferences. Rather than two different world views along a spectrum (Liberal and Neocon), perhaps what we have is more like a grid with varying degrees of multilateralism and unilateralism as well as degrees of interventionism and noninterventionism. I think it is otherwise quite difficult to describe the various voices in American foreign policy debates…

(A description of of these varied voices after the jump…)

This week we are pleased to host the first discussion in the Oxford University Press/ Opinio Juris Book Club.

Tom Farer, the Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, will join us to discuss his new book, Confronting Global Terrorism and American Neo-Conservatism: The Framework of a Liberal Grand Strategy. In addition, Kristen Boon from Seton Hall Law School will be joining us for the conversation as well.

Today, Tom will introduce his book in general and we will discuss issues relating to the use of force and, in particular, whether the norms of the UN Charter concerning the use of force have collapsed.  Wednesday’s discussion will focus on the role of human rights law and international humanitarian law in the struggle against transnational terrorism. Thursday’s main topic will be international law and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Finally, on Friday we will consider human rights and the rights of traditionalist cultural minorities in secularist states.

We look forward to the conversation and, as always, we encourage comments and questions.

The blog Futurismic as an interesting post on “viral sovereignty.” According to a recent Washington Post op-ed by Richard Holbrooke and Laurie Garrett: 

This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations — even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat to all the peoples of the world.

And, in case you think this is just a quirky footnote, Holbrooke and Garrett explain:

 A year ago, Supari’s assertions about “viral sovereignty” seemed to be odd yet individual views. Disturbingly, however, the notion has morphed into a global movement, fueled by self-destructive, anti-Western sentiments. In May, Indian Health Minister A. Ramadoss endorsed the concept in a dispute with Bangladesh. The Non-Aligned Movement — a 112-nation organization that is a survivor of the Cold War era — has agreed to consider formally endorsing the concept of “viral sovereignty” at its November meeting.

Check out both the post at Futurismic and the underlying op-ed.

Take a look at this commentary about Russia invading Georgia:

In order to be able to deny the invasion of Russian troops, it was first stated that some villages on the Georgian frontier had revolted, embittered by the tyranny of the, Georgians…. Simultaneously, Abkhazia had risen in the extreme northwest, close to the Russian border.

It is a remarkable fact that the rebellions broke out precisely in those places, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Abkhazia, where large and constantly increasing masses of Russian troops had been quartered since November.

The inhabitants of some Armenian border villages are supposed to have insisted on advancing towards Tiflis (Tbilisi). The Russian Government stated it had endeavored, out of love of peace and benevolence, to help the threatened Georgian regime, and offered its mediation between the Georgians and the Armenians. It could not help it if Georgia contemptuously rejected this mediation.

It was written in 1921.

For anyone following the situation in Georgia and US/ Russian relations, there was a very interesting statement and Q&A today from Secretary of State Rice, who is in Brussels for meetings at NATO. Among other things, she announced the creation of a new NATO-Georgia cooperative framework and also discussed the concerns about isolating Russia. Among other topics, she also answered questions about the decision by the OSCE to send 100 monitors into Georgia. 

Some of her statements are rather strongly worded but, of course, diplomatic announcements are one thing and actual actions are another. So the questions remain:  Is this NATO-Georgia commission an intermediate step towards a further expansion of NATO’s role in the region (thus possibly further angering Russia) or is it a signal to Russia (with a little face-saving on NATO’s part) that NATO has heard Russia loud and clear and it is putting aside plans of expansion into the Caucasus? Time will tell. For now, here’s Rice’s statement and the Q&A (with some highlighting on my part of passages that I think are especially worthy of note)…

UPDATE: See Russian and Georgian reactions (both negative) after the Rice Q&A