• Yesterday, the ICJ reached its judgment in the frontier dispute between Burkina Faso and Niger. The BBC has more here.
• According to a bipartisan report by the Constitution Project (.pdf), the US has engaged in torture at the highest levels. Human Rights Watch also offers a statement here.
• The New Zealand parliament has passed a bill legalizing same-sex marriage.
• Privacy International has sued the United Kingdom over concerns for refusing to divulge information surrounding surveillance equipment used by the UK. 
• Ex-rebels have launched reprisal attacks in the Central African Republic’s capital, Bangui, while the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has expressed grave concern that since the overthrow of the government three weeks ago, there has been a rise of torture, rape, kidnappings and targeted killings in the country.
• Foreign Policy has a piece showcasing China as a cyberwar victim to US hackers.
• Human Rights Watch highlights several recent attacks in Somalia, specifically against a courthouse and an aid workers’ convoy, carried out by Al-Shebaab and classifying them as war crimes.
• The Pakistan Taliban have denied any involvement in the Boston Marathon bombing.
• The President of the General Assembly and former foreign affairs minister of Serbia, Vuk Jeremic, has defended last week’s General Assembly meeting on international justice and reaffirmed his criticism of the ICTY as a template for other war crimes tribunals.
• Over at Foreign Affairs, David Kaye asks how long America’s honeymoon with the ICC will last.
• The European Commission has given Serbia a final chance to reach a deal with Kosovo by delaying the release of a report on Serbia’s preparedness to become an EU Member State.
• The EU is also holding out the carrot of membership to Albania in an effort to ensure that the June elections live up to international standards.
• The EU’s Trade Commissioner is considering to investigate subsidies of Huawei and ZTE even in the absence of a formal complaint by European competitors.

• Oral arguments began yesterday at the ICJ in the Thailand-Cambodia border dispute about land surrounding the Temple Vihear, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 
• Syrian warplanes have launched further attacks in Damascus in addition to a handful of other rebel-held Syrian cities.
• Heads of the World Health Organization and UNICEF made a rare political plea to the international community yesterday stating that intervention is needed in Syria now to prevent the crisis from reaching a dangerous tipping point.
• The UN Security Council is meeting today to discuss a potential deployment of 12,600 peacekeepers to Mali to assist French troops battling rebel threats; these peacekeeping forces would be able to use “all necessary means” to combat the threats. Chad’s President has announced that his country’s troops are withdrawing from Mali.
• At the Security Council, Rwanda has blocked consensus on a non-binding statement that would have recommended that the ICC play a role in solving Africa’s conflicts and human rights problems.
• The ACLU has appealed a recent ruling allowing the Obama administration to keep silent about its drone program.
• Though North Korea’s ambassador to the UK has given a rare speech to the Communist Party of Great Britain stating that North Korea is only interested in self-defense, North Korea made new threats yesterday towards South Korea, Japan and the United States. China points the finger at the US for stoking tensions in the region.
• Arms Control Blog offers an analysis of the North Korea situation referencing Julian’s post here yesterday and asking where the “red line” might be on military action.
• ASIL has published a new Insight entitled Will the WTO Finally Tackle Corruption in Public Purchasing? The Revised Agreement on Government Procurement (.pdf).
• The Guardian has an overview of the five remaining candidates in the race to become the WTO’s next Director-General.
• The Refugee Council of Australia has urged its government to recognize climate change refugee status.
• As the first European country to do so, Iceland has signed a free trade agreement with China.

• As North Korea celebrated the 101st birthday of the country’s founder, the US has said it is ready to “reach out” if Pyongyang gives up its nuclear aspirations after warning North Korea that a nuclear missile launch would be a “huge mistake.” 
• Foreign Policy offers a way to solve the North Korea nuke problem, opining that the road to Pyongyang goes through Helsinki.
• Foreign Policy also points out that while a lot of focus has been on North Korean missiles, there were two other countries busy this week with testing their launch capabilities: India and Pakistan.
• Guards at Guantanamo are trying to end the hunger strike of 43 inmates that began in February; some 11 inmates are being force-fed through tubes inserted into their noses and mouths, a practice considered torture by some. One detainee, through his lawyers, has an op-ed in the New York Times describing his experience on hunger strike since February 10.
• Reports from Syria say that children and other civilians have been killed in the latest round of government bombing campaigns in Damascus and Hadad.
• The melting of Antarctic ice is currently the worst it has been in more than 1,000 years.
• Professor William Schabas offers some thoughts on the recent General Assembly meeting about international justice, an event we covered here in our News Wrap.
• UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Counterterrorism, Ben Emmerson, has called on countries to protect Burkina Faso from terrorism, given its vulnerability especially with respect to the current conflict in Mali.
• After a first round of negotiations, the WTO has narrowed down the list of candidates for the position of Director-General to five: Ms Mari Elka Pangestu (Indonesia), Mr Tim Groser (New Zealand), Mr Herminio Blanco (Mexico), Mr Taeho Bark (Republic of Korea) and Mr Roberto Carvalho de Azevêdo (Brazil).
• Figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute show that global military expenditure has decreased in the past year, although this masks a shift in spending globally, with the US and Western and Central Europe spending less and other states, particularly China and Russia, spending more.
• Suicide bombs have killed at least 20 in Mogadishu, Somalia, and at least as many in a series of car bombs around Iraq.

Calls for papers

• In case you haven’t seen it yet, we have launched our own call for papers aimed at LL.M, Ph.D and S.J.D. students as well as those practitioners/academics within the first five years post-degree to participate in our New Voices symposium starting in July. The deadline for 200-word abstract submissions is May 1, 2013.
• Vermont Law School will host the fourth-annual Colloquium on Environmental Scholarship October 11, 2013, and has issued a call for abstracts. From the website: “If you are interested in presenting a paper at the Colloquium, please submit a working title and short abstract, using our online form, no later than June 1, 2013. For an abstract to be eligible for submission, the author must anticipate that the paper will still be at a revisable stage (neither published nor so close to publication that significant changes are not feasible) by the date of the Colloquium. We will do our best to include all interested presenters, and will notify authors about acceptances no later than July 2013.”
• The International Review of Law invites submissions for its next editions to be published in July and January. Papers may be in English or Arabic. Submissions are considered on a rolling basis. Selected authors will be invited to Qatar University College of Law in Doha to conduct a guest lecture on their area of research.

Upcoming events

• The 22nd annual Society of Legal Scholars’ International Law section/British Institute of International and Comparative Law conference on theory and international law will be held April 29 in London. This year’s topic is Sanctions and Embargoes: International Law and Contemporary Practice?, and more information can be found here.
• The international conference on NON-STATE ACTOR RESPONSIBILITIES: EMPIRICAL FINDINGS AND THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS, co-chaired by the Institute for Transborder Studies and the Non-State Actor Committee of the International Law association, will take place in Richmond (Vancouver), BC, Canada, on June 26-28, 2013. The conference will address the obligations and responsibilities of non-state actors with a view to understanding the complexity of non-state actors’ international legal personality, their responsibility and compliance with international law, and the associated legal consequences. Focus is placed on the following five categories of non-state actors: non-governmental organizations (NGOs), multinational/transnational corporations (MNCs), certain organized armed opposition groups, sui generis entities such the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and organised indigenous peoples’ groups. For further information and registration, please see this link.

Last week’s post can be found here. If you would like to post an announcement on Opinio Juris, please contact us.

• The US says with “moderate confidence” that North Korea does in fact have a nuclear weapon that they would be capable of mounting to a ballistic missile, but that such a weapon would likely be unreliable.
• At the G8 summit in London, leaders were “appalled” by the violence and number of casualties in Syria and urged humanitarian assistance from all countries.
• During an interview with CNN, Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf admitted to striking a secret deal with the US about drone strikes, but ”only on a few occasions, when a target was absolutely isolated and no chance of collateral damage.”
• And speaking of drones, Foreign Policy offers ten ways to fix the drone war.
• The UK will not invite Argentinian president Cristina Fernandez to the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, but later decided that “good manners” required that at the very least the Argentinian ambassador should be invited.
• Julian will be happy to see some sign of progress at last: the ICJ will hear Australia’s case against Japan over the latter’s whaling program in late June and early July.
• At talks in Geneva, the US Ambassador to the WTO has urged his counterparts to seek clear instructions from their government to get the ball going on substantive negotiations for a new agreement by the end of the year.
• At the urging of the European Commission, Turkey has removed restrictions on free speech and adjusted its anti-terrorism laws to bring its legislation in line with jurisprudence by the European Court of Human Rights.

• Human Rights Watch has published a new report entitled Death from the Skies alleging that Syrian forces have killed over 4,300 civilians by targeting places like bakeries and hospitals, and calls these air raids war crimes. 
• Concerns about Syria and North Korea top the agenda of the G8 summit taking place this week in London.
• The EU has informed North Korea that it didn’t think the recent tensions warrant a withdrawal of EU Members’ diplomats from Pyongyang.
• The UN General Assembly is debating the role of the international criminal justice system in reconciliation, a meeting that the US and other nations boycotted because of allegations that Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremic, the meeting’s organizer, is using it as a way to unfairly criticize the ICTY and divert attention away from the role of Serbia in the Balkan wars.
• Nuon Chea, also known as “Brother Number Two” to Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot has been found fit to stand trial before the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia.
• Foreign Policy has more on the McClatchy report we told you about yesterday that fewer than two percent of those killed by drone in Pakistan are senior Al-Qaeda leaders. Micah Zenko at FP calls this proof that the US has been lying in the drone wars an Inconvenient Truth.
• Uruguay has legalized same-sex marriage, making it the second South American country to do so, along with Argentina.
• Japan has given Taiwan an unconditional concession to fish in a large area of the contested East China Sea. The breakthrough is seen as a move by Japan to keep Taiwan on its side.
• A US judge has ordered that the US must prove that Pfc. Bradley Manning knew that the documents he leaked to Wikileaks would aid al-Qaeda and other US enemies.

• South Korea has increased surveillance and asked China to rein in North Korea after Pyongyang moved a long-range missile in preparation for a possible launch.
• North Korea has warned foreigners to evacuate South Korea and said the area is headed for “thermo-nuclear war.”
• Germany and France express growing concerns that Washington-backed EU sanctions on North Korea could negatively affect aid groups.
• Amnesty International published its report (.pdf) on the death penalty in 2012 today, citing global progress with ending the practice.
• John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, has ended three days of meetings in the Middle East promising aid to Palestine and hoping for a restart to the peace process.
• France has begun withdrawing troops from Mali in an effort to transition the operations to a UN-mandated force.
• Jurist has more on Uhuru Kenyatta’s swearing-in as Kenya’s newest president.
• Al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch has reportedly merged with a Syrian armed opposition group, a move likely to cause concern with the opposition’s international supporters.
• US president Barack Obama has pledged military assistance to Somalia in a move to “strengthen the security of the United States and promote world peace.”
• Copies of a top-secret US intelligence report obtained by McClatchy news service show that US drone strikes in Pakistan have targeted ”alleged Afghan insurgents whose organization wasn’t on the U.S. list of terrorist groups at the time of the 9/11 strikes; of suspected members of a Pakistani extremist group that didn’t exist at the time of 9/11; and of unidentified individuals described as ‘other militants’ and ‘foreign fighters.’”

• Global leaders have paid their respects to Margaret Thatcher, the UK’s first female prime minister, after her death yesterday.
• Thousands of North Korean workers have failed to show up for work at a shared industrial complex with South Korea after the North Korean leadership said it would withdraw workers and suspend work. 
• With more on the North Korea situation, Foreign Policy asks whether Kim Jong Un can use his nukes and get away with it.
• Syria has alleged that the UN is widening its scope of the current chemical weapons probe in the country.
• UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has warned of a spillover from the conflict in Mali to Western Sahara.
• Uhuru Kenyatta is set to be sworn in as president in Kenya leaving backers of the International Criminal Court in a sticky situation as Kenyatta faces a warrant of arrest by the ICC.
• Human Rights Watch has a Q&A on the recent developments of the ICC regarding Kenya as well as a call to the new Kenyan leadership to uphold rights and obligations.
• The Pakistani Supreme Court ordered former president Pervez Musharraf to respond to allegations of treason stemming from his 1999 military overthrow of prime minister Nawaz Sharif and the suspension of the constitution.
• During Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Germany and the Netherlands, he was greeted by gay-rights activists and topless protesters meant to put the spotlight on Russia’s human rights record and treatment of sexual minorities.
• ECHR Blog points us to the Draft Agreement of the European Union to the European Court of Human Rights, finalized last week.
• OUP Blog has three new featured posts, one on The 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, one entitled The Arms Trade Treaty: A major achievement and Lessons from Iraq 10 years on.
  

• There are reports stating that North Korea is preparing to carry out a fourth nuclear test based on intelligence coming out of South Korea. 
• In the face of the rising tensions on the Korean peninsula, Foreign Policy offers advice about how to stop a nuclear war.
• Without directly naming North Korea, China has been critical of its recent actions to escalate tension on the Korean peninsula. Not everyone in the US is convinced that China has done enough.
• Eleven children and one woman were killed in eastern Afghanistan when NATO carried out strike targeting militants.
• The UN Mission in South Sudan called on the government of South Sudan to do more to protect communities that are at risk of violence.
• The World Health Organization urges calm in the face of the H7N9 bird flu outbreak in China, saying that now is “not a time for over-reaction or panic.”
• Wikileaks has created a searchable database of the “Kissinger Cables,” a collection of US diplomatic records from 1973 to 1976.
• Serbia has indicated that it wants to continue negotiations with Kosovo over the status of ethnic Serbs in Northern Kosovo, but would prefer the negotiations to be mediated by an international organization it is a member of rather than by the EU, which has conditioned the start of membership negotiations on an agreement between Serbia and Kosovo.
• A young US diplomat was killed in Afghanistan on Saturday when trying to deliver books to a local school, in the first deadly attack on US diplomats since Benghazi.

• Today marks 1000 days in the countdown towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon suggests four steps that the international community needs to take to achieve these goals.
• South Korea has reported its neighbor to the north has moved a missile to the east coast; the US has vowed to take “all necessary precautions” in response.
• World powers await Iran’s reaction to the offer on the table that will ease some economic sanctions if Iran stops its most sensitive nuclear work.
• Diane Marie Amann offered this speech on International Law and the Future of Peace upon receiving the Prominent Women in International Law award during yesterday’s ASIL Women in International Law Interest Group Luncheon.
• Foreign Policy outlines the dangers of low-tech warfare in Why Sticks and Stones Will Beat Our Drones.
• The Christian Science Monitor has an article discussing the options available to the EU in response to Hungary’s latest instalment of controversial constitutional amendments.
• EU authorities have also expressed concern over legislative proposals in Egypt to curtain civil society.
• Syria has stepped up propaganda efforts against Jordan and Turkey.

As many of our readers may know, ASIL’s 107th Annual Meeting with the theme of International Law in a Multipolar World is taking place in Washington D.C. at the Marriott Renaissance Hotel today through Saturday.

Select highlights of the meeting include:

• The Grotius Lecture, with Emilio Álvarez Icaza, Executive Secretary, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights as the Speaker and W. Michael Reisman, Yale Law School as the Distinguished Discussant (Wednesday, April 3).
  
• The Women in International Law Interest Group Luncheon, featuring Diane Marie Amann as the Honoree/Speaker and a plenary discussion about International Law in the Obama Administration: The First Four Years. Donald Francis Donavan of Debevoise & Plimpton will moderate the plenary among Harold Hongju Koh, Yale Law School; Michael H. Posner, Department of State; and Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University (Thursday, April 4).
• The Hudson Medal Luncheon will feature Judge Bruno Simma of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal as the Speaker/Honoree and will be moderated by Joseph Weiler of New York University School of Law (Friday, April 5).
• The Inaugural Charles N. Brower Lecture will be delivered by V.V. Johnny Veeder. A plenary panel will follow to discuss Twenty Years of International Criminal Law: From ICTY to ICC and Beyond, moderated by Abi Williams, President of The Hague Institute for Global Justice and featuring Fatou Bensouda, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court and Theodore Meron, President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (Friday, April 5).
• The Closing Plenary will discuss Global Governance, State Sovereignty and the Future of International Law, moderated by José Alvarez of New York University School of Law and featuring Judge Bruno Simma of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, Judge Xue Hanqin of the International Court of Justice and Joel P. Trachtman of the Fletcher School of Dipomacy at Tufts University (Saturday, April 6).
• Our own Julian Ku will be moderating a panel on China and International Law featuring Jacques DeLisle, University of Pennsylvania School of Law; Bing Bing Jia, Tsinghua University Law School; and Stephanie Klein-Ahlbrandt, International Crisis Group (Friday, April 5)
• Our own Roger Alford will moderate a panel on Kiobel, the ATS and Human Rights Litigation in US Courts. Panelists will be John B. Bellinger, Arnold & Porter, LLP; Lori Damrosch, Columbia University; David Scheffer, Northwestern University; and Elizabeth Wilson, Seton Hall University (Friday, April 5). Roger will also be participating in a discussion about Jeremy Waldron’s new book, “Partly Laws Common to All Mankind”, Foreign Laws in American Courts (Friday, April 5).
• Our own Chris Borgen will co-chair the Space Law Interest Group Business Meeting (Friday, April 5).
• And our own Kevin Heller is on the ASIL Annual Meeting Program committee, led by Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, University of Geneva; Stanimir Alexandrov, Sidley Austin, LLP; and Kal Raustiala, University of California Los Angeles School of Law.

Additionally, our friends at ASIL have asked us to help spread the word about another event taking place during the meeting. The event is Connecting Junior and Senior International Law Academics and it will take place Thursday, April 4, 2013, from 3:15-4:45 p.m. in the Renaissance East Ballroom.

This event, as its title suggests, it is focused on creating new intellectual and mentoring relationships among junior and senior international law academics. It will provide opportunities for people to meet other academics who share similar substantive and conceptual interests through small group discussions and “speed dating.” Please attend to meet new and interesting colleagues and to support ASIL’s junior academic members in their development.

The full program can be found and downloaded here (.pdf). Some of the sessions will be live streamed here and you can follow ASIL Cables, the online daily reporter of the 107th ASIL Meeting. OUP Blog has prepared for the meeting in a post here.