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...
On the lighter side of international law, over the weekend a law student was crowned Miss World 2005. You would think the most beautiful law student in the world would attend the most beautiful law school, (as ranked by 100,000 students who attend elsewhere). But no, Unnur Birna Vilhjalmsdottir, 21, is a law student in Iceland of all places, and...
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...
The text of Mohamed El-Baradei's Nobel Peace Prize Lecture is here. It is quite good. It is perhaps too utopian for my taste, but if any group deserves utopian license it is that category of individuals known as Nobel Peace laureates. We may have in El-Baradei a prophet of peace from (and for) the Arab world.The speech is hopeful, cosmopolitan,...
As IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei is about to receive the Nobel Prize at the same time as he announces that the international community is losing patience with Iran's intransigence over its nuclear program, I'm prompted to continue thinking about the relationship between international law and US power. Now, it's true that the IAEA has had numerous successful instances of...
In 1933, his first year as chancellor, Adolph Hitler began boycotting Jewish shops. By 1935 he deprived Jews of German citizenship. In early 1938, laws were passed restricting Jewish economic activity. In October 1938, thousands of Polish Jews were deported. Then, on the nights of November 9-10, 1938, a pogrom was unleashed on Jewish businesses as gangs of Nazi youth...
What if contract law scholars never studied the end game? What if they offered little to no analysis of early contract termination, rescission, or frustration of purpose? What if the entire focus of contract law was on contract formation, performance and breach, and that any unilateral lawful attempts to avoid contractual obligations were looked at with a jaundiced...
In very welcome news on the humanitarian law front, the signatory states of the Geneva Conventions voted yesterday (98 in favor, 27 against, 10 abstentions) to adopt a Third Optional Protocol, adding the red crystal symbol to the red cross and red crescent as a permissible emblem. This clears the way for membership into the movement of Isreali relief...
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...
The United States is currently bound by over 10,000 treaties and other international agreements. That’s a big number. But as Detlev Vagts noted seven years ago (subscription required), the United States has done a poor job of making these treaties publicly available. In terms of publications, the situation has only deteriorated in the interim. If you are hoping to find...
A Chilean court has just stripped former dictator Augusto Pinochet of his immunity so that he may face human rights charges in the disappearances of 29 people. While this may be a good decision from the perspective of retributive justice (see my earlier post on this), it has some troubling implications for international politics. Not the least of...
Last week, US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton claimed that the UN was demonstrating its irrelevance by adopting several resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Bolton argued that the resolutions were undermining the real progress being made in the peace process, and only served to advance one narrow position and...
