According to the NYT, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter and the White House has reached a deal on a bill to subject President Bush's controversial NSA wiretapping program to limited judicial review. It's a little hard to figure out exactly what they've agreed to, but according to Sen. Specter, the bill will subject the program to a...
The International Court of Justice has rejected Argentina's request for an indication of provisional measures suspending Uruguay's construction of a pulp mill upstream on the River Uruguay. The Court concluded that: [t]here is nothing in the record to demonstrate that the actual decision by Uruguay to authorize the construction of the mills poses an imminent threat of irreparable damage to...
Professor Jeremy Rabkin of Cornell, a leading critic of the liberal internationalist movement in the academy, offers a surprisingly soft critique of the Supreme Court's decision in Hamdan (a decision that is fast becoming the new rallying cry for conservatives). Rabkin, a frequent critic of the ICC, the use of international law in constitutional interpretation, and many international law regimes...
According to the BBC, widely-anticipated peace talks between the Ugandan government and the notorious Lord's Resistance Army may fall apart due to the LRA's refusal to send any of their top five leaders to the planned meeting site. ICC arrest warrants have been issued against all of the five top LRA leaders and this may be the main reason...
The NYT has a useful account of the brewing debate in Congress over how to respond to the Supreme Court's Hamdan decision. According to the article, Congress may spend the rest of the summer dealing with this. Here are some of the options: (1) A one-sentence statute repealing Hamdan's interpretation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, essentially completely restoring...
I used to think that ICJ advisory opinions, like the July 9, 2004 ICJ opinion finding Israel's separation wall a violation of international law, didn't have much legal significance. But maybe I'm wrong. The ICJ opinion does open up a new avenue to pressure the Israeli Government - sue or boycott corporations for complicity in Israel's alleged human...
Volokh Conspiracy contributor David Kopel has a provocative op-ed in the WSJ($) today alleging that, despite their denials, the U.N.-sponsored Small Arms Conference really does want to ban all guns. The U.N. has long urged that firearms must never be transferred to "non-state actors" -- that is, entities which are neither governments nor government-approved. Only John Bolton's intransigence prevented the...
For those who haven't had enough of reading my thoughts on Hamdan, I have a short contribution to an online symposium hosted by National Review Online on the Hamdan decision. In it, I focus on the Hamdan court's refusal to defer to the President's interpretation of treaties and customary international law. ...
Marty Lederman, the tireless blogger-critic of the Administration's detention and interrogation policies, argues that because the Supreme Court has held that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to the war with al-Qaeda, "[p]er today's decision, the Administration appears to have been engaged in war crimes, which are subject to the death penalty." (He further notes that such...
I'm still working my way through the Hamdan decision, but let me weigh in here with a couple of initial thoughts:* (1) As Professors Peter Spiro and Paul Stephan both suggest below, the Court did not hold that the Geneva Conventions are judicially enforceable by a private lawsuit absent separate Congressional action (Marty Lederman thinks differently, see his discussion here). The...
Not to distract from the Hamdan case (and note Peter's and Geoff's useful comments below), on which I have plenty to say (but not just now), I am pleased to share with Opinio Juris readers the thoughts of Professor Paul Stephan of UVA Law School, who submitted an amicus brief in favor of Virginia and Oregon in Sanchez-Llamas/Bustillo, the ICJ...
OK, maybe that is overstating the majority opinion's holding today, in Sanchez-Llamas/Bustillo, but not by much. In an opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court rejected attempts by alien criminal defendants to invoke the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR) to either suppress evidence against them during a trial, or to challenge their conviction in post-trial hearings. ...
