Author: Julian Ku

The results of this new study about the ineffectiveness of international aid to certain developing countries is not surprising, but it is still depressing. For years, the international community has forked over billions in health aid, believing the donations supplemented health budgets in poor countries. It now turns out development money prompted some governments to spend on entirely different things, which...

I don't know a lot about CEDAW, the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, but I know that lots of groups on both sides think the treaty is really important. For instance, in this post, a critic of CEDAW quotes a proponent of CEDAW, Janet Benshoof,  for the view that: "[W]ere the United States (US) to ratify CEDAW, it would bring...

I don't fully understand the nature of the legal charges against Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon. It sounds like, from this Economist article, that he is being accused of some version of "prosecutorial" and "judicial" misconduct for refusing to follow the terms of Spain's 1977 amnesty law preventing investigations into Franco-era crimes.  Garzon apparently held that there is a consensus that...

Here's another interesting report on the ongoing battle against Somalia-based pirates.  The upshot: some progress is being made, especially with private security forces (including one which uses sound waves to push away approaching pirates).  But legal limitations continue to limit the effectiveness of both naval and private self-defense. “No commanding officer of any ship wants a situation where he used force...

Walter Russell Mead has an illuminating post on the liberal internationalist tendencies of the Obama Administration.  Putting aside whether or not liberal internationalism is, as Mead puts it, "a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it to make consistently bad decisions about American foreign policy.", I find his post fascinating for its classification of different approaches...

It's not exactly a hot topic, even among international lawyers, yet the ongoing dispute over the Western Sahara (and Morocco's claim to it) has drawn the attention of 54 U.S. Senators, who recently sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Clinton about it favoring support for Morocco's 2007 proposal for autonomy in the disputed region. This analysis claims the...

Happy Easter, everyone!  I recognize this is a bit of an unpleasant topic to bring up on a holy day, but it is worth noting that the rumblings about litigation against the Vatican and the Pope over the various child-sex-abuse scandals continue.  Lawyers in the UK are actively researching how and whether to bring legal action during the Pope's upcoming...

Genocide is one of those phrases with both highly potent political ramifications as well as highly complicated legal requirements.  These two characteristics, GUÉNAËL METTRAUX argues in the IHT, make the obsessive focus on whether something is or is not a genocide (Armenia? Srebenica?) a largely hopeless and unhelpful exercise for historical events. The very proposition that legal concepts such as genocide could...

I don't know if I buy this article's suggestion that the various Catholic Church priest-pedophile scandals amount to a "crime against humanity" under international law, but I do think the Pope's right to "head of state" immunity under international law is a tough question.  In the U.S., the Pope has been granted head of state immunity (thanks to President Bush...