I just wanted to jump in with a quick response to Geoffrey Corn's excellent post in favor of general court martials over military commissions. If I read his post correctly, he is criticizing the Guantanamo detention centers and the use of military commissions on pragmatic foreign policy grounds rather than on purely legal ones. In other words, he is...
I want to follow up on Chris's great post summing up our past year, but there's a lot there. So in the meantime, I thought I'd point out one definitely non-top 25 IL event for 2005 or 2006. The NYT reports that the secretariat of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora has suspended...
Seth has finished his very successful tenure as a guest-blogger here at Opinio Juris and his legacy goes on. One of his posts on the potential for universal human rights deeply intrigued a colleague of mine at Hofstra, Bernard Jacobs, a professor of constitutional law and a classics scholar. His thoughtful and interesting response to Seth's post is below:I read...
As some of you have noticed, my blogging has been very light as of late. As I mentioned in a prior post (I think), I am currently teaching a winter course at the University of the Netherlands Antilles on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao. The winter course is co-sponsored by Hofstra, the University of Baltimore, and Erasmus University...
My travelling during the past two weeks has prevented me from blogging. Luckily, our intrepid guest bloggers Duncan and Seth have filled in wonderfully, along with our Opinio Juris regulars. Although I have enjoyed reading posts from both Duncan and Seth (and I hate to start a fight on Christmas Eve), I have to disagree with some of Seth's analysis...
As Duncan notes below, President Bush has reached a deal with Senator John McCain on the so-called anti-torture bill. I agree with Duncan that as a political, and maybe as a moral matter, the bill is a victory for McCain and critics of the U.S. detainee policies. I disagree with Duncan, however, that the bill is a "legal victory". As...
The Israeli Defense Forces has long used targeted assassinations to eliminate alleged terrorists, as Steven Spielberg's newest film Munich reminds us. Interestingly, the government of Israel is currently defending the legality of the practice, invoking the customary international law of war to justify its recent killing of two alleged Palestinian terrorists. The theory here is that after...
Secretary Rice continues her PR offensive. This time, her target audience is U.S. readers of the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section and her topic is not torture, but a restatement of the Bush Administration's main strategic goals in foreign policy as the search for a Kantian(?) "democratic peace." None of this is new exactly, but it is interesting nonetheless. Here's...
Secretary of State Condi Rice appears to have shifted or at least clarified U.S. administration policy over whether the Convention Against Torture's prohibition of "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment extends to U.S. government personnel operating overseas. In a news conference with the Ukraine Premier, she stated (emphasis added):As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States’ obligations under the CAT...
As I mentioned earlier, U.S. Secretary of State Condi Rice is currently in Europe trying to build transatlantic ties, while at the same time fending off complaints about the CIA's activities in Europe. One of her statements defending the legality of "extraordinary renditions" is a useful pushback against the growing chorus of criticism against the CIA. She points out (and...
As the fighting over the U.S. military's conduct of the war on terrorism, particularly its conduct in Guantanamo Bay, may be heading toward some resolution as a result of new legislation, attention is now turning to the CIA's activities in the war on terrorism.The CIA certainly seems busy. Recently, an alleged Al Qaeda leader was mysteriously blown up in Pakistan,...
Although those of us who blog here on a permanent basis come from a variety of perspectives, all of us are legal academics and no doubt our posts reflect the thinking of international lawyers.But there are other ways of looking at international relations, of course, especially from the discipline of political science. That is why we at Opinio Juris are...
