In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Julian Ku

12 Feb

Last month, the UN Secretary General António Guterres announced that he was referring the longstanding border dispute between Guyana and Venezuela to the International Court of Justice. This decision was made after a long period of mediation by various UN Secretaries-General dating back to 1990.  But as a ICJ jurisdiction nerd, I am curious what the basis of the Secretary-General's power...

|
09 Feb

One of the many reasons I am so pleased that Opinio Juris can host this discussion on Anthea Roberts’ new (and award-winning) book is that it speaks directly to and about this blog’s core audience: students, scholars, and practitioners of international law from all over the world.  When we founded this blog in 2005, we hoped to use the internet...

|
07 Feb

We are thrilled to announce that over the next few days we will be co-hosting with EJIL:Talk! a discussion of Anthea Roberts’ new prize-winning book Is International Law International? (Oxford University Press, 2017). The book has recently been awarded the American Society of International Law’s  2018 Certificate of Merit for “Preeminent Contribution to Creative Scholarship.” As the ASIL Book Awards Committee states: In...

|
29 Oct

International law is famously mushy and subject to a variety of interpretations.  But there are some issues upon which there is more consensus under international law, such as the illegality of Russia’s annexation of Crimea.  But is there any reasonable argument favoring the legality of the Catalan Parliament’s recent declaration of independence from Spain?  I don’t think so. At the outset,...

|
26 Sep

As most of our readers know, Professor M. Cherif Bassiouni, a leading figure in the creation of the field of international criminal law, passed away yesterday at the age of 79. Professor Bassiouni had a large email list of friends and acquaintances, and his email account sent out one last posthumous message last night. We are posting it here for those...

|
10 Jun

Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that one of my pet peeves is the incorrect usage of international legal terms in public and diplomatic discourse.  Hence, Israel did NOT commit "piracy" during the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid despite lots of governments claiming otherwise.  Cuba is not under a "blockade" despite tons of Cuban government propaganda otherwise. So you can imagine my...

|
09 Jun

Distracted by #ComeyDay and other international crises, I missed this recent U.S. federal court decision in Sexual Minorities of Uganda v. Lively, dismissing an Alien Tort Statute lawsuit on Kiobel extra-territoriality grounds.  While using unusually critical language to denounce U.S. pastor-defendant Scott Lively's involvement in Uganda's anti-homosexual laws and actions, the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts held: ...

|
07 Jun

The estimable professor-pundit Daniel Drezner has a typically smart blogpost on President Trump's refusal to affirm the U.S. commitment to Article 5's collective defense provision of the North Atlantic Treaty.  I don't have a problem with his views here, but I can't help jumping in to correct this paragraph from his post: So why is this such a big deal of a story? The United...

|
24 May

[caption id="attachment_33128" align="alignright" width="374"] Grand Justices of the Constitutional Court, Judiciary Yuan, Republic of China - Taiwan[/caption] In a first for Asia, Taiwan's Constitutional Court ruled today (with two dissents) that Taiwanese law limiting marriage to a man and a woman violated the Republic of China's constitutional guarantee of "equality before the law." (Taiwan is home to the exiled Republic of China government,...

|
19 Apr

Over at Vox, I have published an essay fleshing out the thoughts I first published here on the legality of the recent U.S. cruise missile attacks on Syria and the international reaction to it. President Donald Trump’s surprising decision to launch a cruise missile strike on Syria was sharply criticized by Russia as a “flagrant violation of international law.” While it might be...

|