I have posted a new essay on SSRN entitled -- borrowing a phrase from a dissent written by Judge Van den Wyngaert -- "A Stick to Hit the Accused with": The Legal Recharacterization of Facts Under Regulation 55. The essay is forthcoming in a book on the ICC that Carsten Stahn is editing for OUP. Here is the abstract: Regulation 55 was...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Middle East British and U.S. spies targeted a senior EU official, German government buildings, and the office of an Israeli prime minister, according to the latest leaked documents from Edward Snowden published on Friday. Israeli officials said they were not surprised by allegations of spying and played down the...
Calls for Papers The Stanford Journal of International Law seeks contributions by academics, practitioners, and policymakers for its Symposium titled Governing Intelligence: Transnational Threats & the National Security State, which will take place on May 2, 2014 at Stanford Law School. Governing Intelligence will move beyond the surveillance debate to start an interdisciplinary dialogue about the power and limits of intelligence agencies from a comparative and international perspective. Contributions must address either of the...
British artist Banksy knocks it out of the park again, with a rather unusual rendering of a Nativity scene: As ArtInfo notes, this is not Banksy's first comment on the Israel/Palestine conflict. He painted nine amazing murals directly on the wall in 2005, including a boy drawing a chalk ladder over the wall and a girl floating over the wall with...
That's the punchline of a podcast Radiolab just released this week, provocatively titled "Sex, Ducks and The Founding Feud". Along with John Bellinger, Joseph Ellis and Nick Rosenkranz, I was interviewed for the story by Jad Abumrad and Kelsey Padgett. It was a fun experience overall trying to explain to a general audience the importance of the US treaty power and how...
This week Kevin briefly turned the blog into The Onion Juris with his satirical ICTY press release, after the Court, in Kevin's opinion, nailed the final nail in the coffin of its legitimacy. In a guest post, Eugene Kontorovich framed the question as a design choice in terms of who should bear the risk when a judge becomes unavailable before a trial has...
Oklahoma City police are obviously upset that the UK has pulled ahead of the US in the competition to have the most absurd definition of terrorism. Hence this: On Friday, Oklahoma City police charged a pair of environmental activists with staging a "terrorism hoax" after they unfurled a pair of banners covered in glitter—a substance local cops considered evidence of a faux biochemical assault. Stefan...
[Eugene Kontorovich is a Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law.] What should an international court do when the judges hearing a case are not around to decide it, as has happened on the ICTY in the Seselj case that Kevin has written about? The death or serious illness of an international judge during the pendency of a case is an entirely foreseeable matter. International...
First off, I would like to thank Paul, Daniel, and David for their very thoughtful comments. I’m glad to have the opportunity to respond to some of the key points that they made.
Paul provocatively suggested that perhaps we should care about results rather than democratic accountability per se. If a particular set of institutional arrangements actually improves human lives, maybe it’s of secondary importance whether those institutional arrangements are anti-democratic. Put in the terms of my article, the question wouldn’t be whether the World Bank suffers from a democratic deficit, but whether Congress’s participation in setting World Bank policy advances the Bank’s efforts to rid the world of poverty.
That’s a challenging question. Many government and Bank officials decry Congress’s meddling, arguing that it politicizes the Bank, that coping with congressionally-created financial crises detracts resources and staff time away from the Bank’s core mission, and that Congress’s interventions amplify the Bank’s tendency to cater to members who contribute funds at the expense of members who borrow them. Those are serious concerns. At the same time, the U.S. Congress was a forceful advocate of some innovations in the Bank’s operations that are widely praised, including the establishment of the World Bank Inspection Panel. The voting rules at the World Bank ensure that only those proposals that are able to gain the support of a range of member states are translated into World Bank policy. The obviously parochial legislated instructions that could impede the Bank’s efforts to support development are typically dead on arrival.
Both Daniel and David ask whether the dynamics the article describes in the World Bank context are likely to carry over to other international organizations, especially those that are more central to foreign affairs. Isn’t the conventional wisdom about the President’s dominance in foreign affairs, Daniel asks, really a story about high-salience foreign-affairs issues? Well, kind of. It’s certainly right that “foreign affairs” is often equated, explicitly or implicitly, with war and national security. But one of the points I hoped to emphasize is that this is an increasingly outdated and misleading perception of what “foreign affairs” encompasses. Today, nearly every federal regulatory regime has an international counterpart of some kind. To name just a few, there are international agreements that address wetlands protection, financial institutions, and food safety standards. If we want to understand the dynamics between the political branches in foreign affairs, we would be seriously remiss to ignore the vast realm of lower-salience issues.
The narrower question nonetheless stands:
In Congress Underestimated, Kristina Daugirdas offers a valuable new perspective on the role of the Congress in shaping the foreign relations of the United States with respect to international institutions. The article presents a fascinating case study of the assertive role of the Congress in influencing executive branch positions towards the World Bank and offers an interesting counter-example to the idea that the President reigns supreme in contemporary foreign relations. In these comments, I want to address two important questions raised by the article: First, is it right that Congress has been underestimated with respect to its influence over the World Bank? Second, is the World Bank case exceptional or does it reflect a more generalizable conclusion about the role of Congress in shaping US policy towards international institutions?
Daugirdas argues that leading accounts of Congress as a feeble participant in foreign affairs have underestimated its influence over US participation in the governance of the World Bank. She highlights the ways in which Congress has used its power of the purse to impose conditions on funding and give directives regarding the positions taken by the US Executive Director of the World Bank. Across Presidential administrations and in times of both unified and divided government, the executive branch has largely followed these congressional instructions with respect to the World Bank. Although the article recognizes some limits to this influence, it captures an important source of congressional leverage even as it potentially overstates its ultimate impact on the day-to-day operations of the Bank.
PRESS RELEASE (Exclusively for the use of the media. Not an official document) The Hague, 25 December 2013 MS/PR1593e Acquitted defendants to be immediately apprehended and executed The Trial Chamber on Saturday issued a decision on the status of the freedom of individuals acquitted by the Tribunal. The Chamber unanimously ordered all such individuals immediately apprehended and executed. The Chamber's order is made pursuant to Rule...
