Serbia announced yesterday that it would seek an ICJ advisory opinion on the legality of Kosovo's declaration of independence. This, to me, is further evidence that the Serbs have no real ability to alter the Kosovo outcome; the plan now is just to harass from a distance and hope Kosovo falls apart on its own. In order to...
My former boss and Medellin's counsel Donald Donovan (of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP) sends out this reaction to the Medelllin decision. Donald Francis Donovan of Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, New York, counsel to petitioner Jose Ernesto Medellín, in response to the March 25, 2008 decision of the United States Supreme Court in MEDELLIN v. TEXAS: We are disappointed in the Supreme Court's...
The Supreme Court's Medellin decision today brings to an end a fascinating decade-long series of interactions between the U.S. Supreme Court, the International Court of Justice, and various state governments. Beginning in 1998, the Supreme Court has now weighed in four times on the ICJ's various interpretations of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the UN Charter, and the...
Thanks to Marty for his pointer on the decision and his instant analysis (which despite being instant, is also still quite interesting). Throughout the day today and into tomorrow, Opinio Juris will post thoughts and comments on the Medellin decision from leading commentators and scholars, in addition to (of course, our substantial "in-blog" expertise. Stay tuned!...
I very much enjoyed reading Professor Hathaway's very strong contribution to an already strong literature on the relationship between treaties and executive agreements in U.S. law. In my view, the particular strength of the article lies in its empirical analysis of U.S. treaty and executive agreement practice, an analysis that has rarely been done in prior work on the...
Canada's Supreme Court ruled yesterday that it would hear a claim brought by Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who is currently being detained at Guantanamo Bay and who is scheduled for trial in a U.S. military commission. The court did not completely reject the Canadian government's non-justiciability arguments, which are that a Canadian court cannot sit in judgment of...
Or so says Professor (and sometime-guest blogger) Eugene Kontorovich in a recent op-ed. As a result, NATO and America have become parties to the carve-up a sovereign state that they subdued by force. To say that this goes against the core principles of the U.N. Charter is an understatement. For international law, the entire process is a string of humiliations. The...
Or something like that. The UN has for some time made copies of its resolutions and other information online at un.org, but like a lot of government initiatives the data published is hardly reusable in any meaningful way. URLs are not persistent, and data formats are not open. A small group led by Julian Todd, a "civil hacker" in Liverpool is seeking...
Somehow, I knew it would come to this. The Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, is headed for a confrontation with the international criminal court after saying he will not hand over to The Hague the leaders of his country's rebel Lord's Resistance Army indicted for war crimes. Museveni said Joseph Kony, the LRA leader, and his commanders will instead be brought before...
One of the big legal issues lurking amid the legal war over the war against terrorism is the applicability of U.S. constitutional rights to U.S. government actions overseas. This is an important, and highly unsettled issue under U.S constitutional law. And I am glad to discover that the U.S. is not alone (The full decision can be found here): A...
How strange it is that the U.S. presidential elections have flipped the usual internationalist/anti-internationalist rhetoric. In his latest speech, Republican candidate Sen. John McCain knocked both of his potential Democratic opponents for their pledge to threaten U.S. withdrawal from the international trade treaty. I will leave it to my opponent to argue that we should abrogate trade treaties, and...
As the Ugandan government and its rebel foes the Lords' Resistance Army have inched toward a negotiated end to their 20 year civil war, I've been blogging rather obsessively over the possibility that the ICC arrest warrants would prove decisive in preventing an end to the conflict. But there were always other reasons why a peace deal in Uganda was...
