In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

28 Aug

I’ve been impressed by the number of questions I’ve fielded in the past few weeks from students, colleagues and media alike about whether the United States can and/or should pay ransoms or exchange prisoners for Americans held by various groups overseas. (I discuss the issue in short clips here and here.) Why did we exchange prisoners to rescue Bowe Bergdahl, but refused to pay ransom for James Foley? Is it illegal to pay ransom to these groups, or just a bad idea? Is it really a bad idea? In the interest of consolidating some answers on a topic that raises a complex cluster of issues, I thought it worth summarizing some of them here – first on the topic of ransom for hostages taken by terrorist groups, then on the topic of prisoner exchanges more broadly. The upshot: It may well be the right policy decision in an individual case for a government not to pay ransom to a terrorist group, but the broader, categorical statement that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” is neither historically accurate nor strategically wise.
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27 Aug

It's only a matter of time before we start seeing proposals to take away the citizenship of Americans fighting for ISIS/ISIL forces in Syria and Iraq. They have drawn renewed attention in the wake of James Foley's beheading (apparently by a British citizen) and the death, reported at length today in the NYT, of American Douglas McCain in Syria. Several...

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27 Aug

The New York Times is running a big report today on the U.S. plan to sign a "sweeping" climate change agreement without having to go to Congress for approval or ratification.  Instead of a typical treaty requiring ratification by the Senate, the U.S. has a different more creative strategy. American negotiators are instead homing in on a hybrid agreement — a proposal...

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27 Aug

On the record, US officials invariably defend even the most indefensible IDF uses of force in Gaza, most often parroting the Israeli line that the IDF does everything it can to spare civilian lives and that Hamas's use of human shields is responsible for any innocent civilians the IDF does kill. When speaking anonymously, however, those same officials tell a very different...

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25 Aug

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Families hiding infected loved ones and the existence of "shadow zones" where medics cannot go mean the West African Ebola epidemic is even bigger than thought, the World Health Organisation has said. Mozambique's former rebel group Renamo and the Frelimo-led government have signed a ceasefire deal, ending two years of armed...

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24 Aug

International Law in Practice is a four-day programme run by the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL), which provides a broad introduction to key issues in international and comparative law - from public to private and from commercial to human rights. The course is unique in that it introduces participants to international law, as broadly understood and as...

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23 Aug

This week  on Opinio Juris, we had the final instalments of our Emerging Voices symposium, with a post by Tamar Meshel on awakening the "Sleeping Beauty of the Peace Palace" and one by Mélanie Vianney-Liaud on the controversy surrounding the definition of the Cambodian genocide at the ECCC. More definitional issues arose in Kevin's post discussing Britain's expanded definition on terrorism, which now includes watching the video...

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22 Aug

Today marks the 150th Anniversary of the signing of the first Geneva Convention -- the Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded in Armies in the Field.  12 States signed it on August 22, 1864, and the treaty went on to have 57 parties before being replaced by later Geneva Conventions in 1906, 1929 and 1949.  The ICRC...

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21 Aug

Reasonable people can disagree about the legal merits of U.S. court judgments against Argentina requiring it to pay holdout creditor hedge funds. But I can’t say the same about Argentina’s recently announced claim against the United States at the International Court of Justice. Based on Argentina’s own description of its legal arguments, I stand by my earlier assessment: Argentina’s international...

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21 Aug

Last November, I wrote a post entitled "Terrorism Is Dead, and Britain Has Killed It." I chose that title because I couldn't imagine a conception of terrorism more absurd than the one argued by the British government and accepted by a Divisional Court: namely, that David Miranda's mere possession of documents illegally obtained by Edward Snowden qualified as terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000. I obviously...

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20 Aug

Just keeping up with the news on international terrorism/counterterrorism this summer could be a full time job. Among many other potentially significant reports, I wanted to highlight this statement recently released by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), often described by U.S. officials as the branch of Al Qaeda that currently poses the greatest threat to the United States....

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