At least that's my guess, based on yesterday's news reports that President Putin had signed a decree that will lead to Russia's suspension of its participation in the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). For those unfamiliar with it, the CFE constituted a landmark arms control agreement, establishing parity in major conventional forces and armaments between...
On Monday, I visited the UN Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) here in Rome for a series of presentations on their legal offices and their current work (for an interesting take on a presentation we heard about the “right to food” check out my colleague David Hoffman’s views over at Concurring Opinions). Among the presentations, one struck me as...
Like Roger, I’m teaching abroad this summer, spending June in Rome as part of Temple Law’s Summer in Rome Program (I’m joined by my fellow blogger, Dave Hoffman of Concurring Opinions, whose the photographer of record for this trip). We’ve got almost 80 students from around the United States in the program, taking classes such as International Dispute Resolution,...
We’re regularly plugging international law conferences here at Opinio Juris. Most of them, however, are in the United States. So, for a change of pace, I want to call attention to any of our readers in Israel of a conference there next week, entitled “Forty Years after 1967: Reappraising the Role and Limits of Legal Discourse on...
On behalf of the regular contributors here at Opinio Juris, I wanted to welcome (and introduce) our first two interns who will be helping out around here (in the virtual sense) over the summer. Brianne Draffin is a rising 3L at Case Western Reserve School of Law in Cleveland, Ohio where she is the Symposium Editor of the Journal...
It’s been a very quiet term for the Senate on treaties. But that may be about to change. The Washington Note is reporting that President Bush will soon publicly announce his support for Senate advice and consent to U.S. accession to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the follow-on Implementation Agreement, which...
A warm welcome to Jacob Cogan and his new blog, International Law Reporter. Cogan—an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and a former colleague of mine at the State Department Legal Adviser’s Office—describes his blog in general terms, covering “scholarship, events, and ideas in international law, international relations, and foreign affairs law.”...
Climate change notwithstanding, transboundary environmental relations between the United States and Canada seem increasingly frosty of late. As I wrote a few months back, Canada and the United States have tangled over construction and operation of an outlet from Devils Lake, North Dakota, and the project’s implications for U.S. obligations not to pollute Canadian waters under the 1909 Boundary...
In 2005, the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) released a VERY long study on customary international humanitarian law. It is an impressive work, spanning more than 5000 pages, presenting the detailed and expansive views of an organization uniquely situated to know what rules have emerged binding states as a matter of custom, separate and apart from their...
My colleague, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, writing over at IntLawGrrls, is reporting a settlement of the dispute over bar dues between foreign defense counsel and the Cambodian Bar Association. The compromise--a one time bar fee for foreign lawyers of $500--removes the last of many roadblocks that had been holding up the tribunal for months. It now looks like this hybrid...
Just when you thought that the comfort women issue could not generate any more news, on Friday, Japan's Supreme Court rejected claims by Chinese comfort women and forced laborers (see here and here). The ruling is interesting for three reasons. First, it would appear to effectively end any chance for a Japanese domestic legal resolution to the comfort...
So, last month I questioned why the United States has done so little to remedy the plight of the comfort women—the thousands of women from countries such as China, Korea, and the Philippines who were sexually enslaved to service Japanese forces during World War II. Why did the United States send in Stu Eizenstat to press for new deals...
