Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces bombarded rebel-held suburbs of Damascus today, keeping up pressure on the besieged region a day after the opposition accused the army of gassing hundreds in a chemical weapons attack. In response, the U.N. Security Council said it was necessary to clarify the alleged chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus, but stopped short of explicitly...
Does anyone out there in the blogosphere have a copy of the Draft Report of the International Law Commission on the Work of Its Forty-Seventh Session, in which the ILC decided not to include drug trafficking in the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind? It is not available on the ILC section of the UN treaty...
[Sven Pfeiffer is an Associate Expert at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The views expressed in this post are those of the author, writing in his personal capacity, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.] National authorities are increasingly involved in the fight against impunity for perpetrators of genocide, war crimes and crimes against...
Japan will dramatically raise its warning about the severity of a toxic water leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant today, upgrading the threat from a level 1 "anomaly" to a level three "serious incident" on an international scale for radiological releases. The British government, accused of abusing media freedom, has said police were right to detain a journalist's partner if they thought...
The new issue of Foreign Affairs has an article by David Kaye, entitled "Stealth Multilateralism." He begins the piece by describing the point of view of the "sovereigntists," (often conservative Republicans) who view treaty-making as a threat to national sovereignty. (See, for example, this recent post by Peter on sovereigntist views.) After arguing that treaty-making is actually an expression of sovereignty, Kaye...
The Faroe Islands has announced it has filed a referred the European Union to arbitration under the UN Convention for the Law of the Sea. Apparently, it is a dispute over herring. “The Faroe Islands have today referred the use of threats of coercive economic measures by the European Union, in relation to the Atlanto-Scandian herring, to an arbitral tribunal under...
[Laura Salvadego is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Law, University of Ferrara. This work has been developed during a research stay at the New York University School of Law - Center for Research in Crime and Justice, funded by Unicredit bank and by 5 per thousand contributions given to the University of Ferrara in 2010] The need to ensure...
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday he was "deeply disturbed" by the deaths in custody of 37 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and condemned an ambush by Islamist militants that killed 25 Egyptian policemen. A leading diplomat from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. ambassador to Syria will meet with a Russian delegation in The Hague next week to...
Criticism of the specific-direction requirement endorsed by the ICTY Appeals Chamber in Perišić has officially jumped the shark. According to James Stewart, the requirement would have required the British military court in Hamburg to acquit the two German businessmen who provided the Zyklon-B that the SS used to gas Jews in the death camps: In any event, let’s assume that specific direction...
[Tamsin Paige is an M.Phil (Law) Candidate at the Australian National University College of Law] Piracy originating from the coast of Somalia hit its peak in 2011, with 236 attacks occurring in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden and the Somali region of the Indian Ocean in that year, according to the IMB’s 2012 piracy report. So far in 2013 the IMB...
British authorities used anti-terrorism powers yesterday to detain Glenn Grenwald's partner (Greenwald is the journalist with close links to Edward Snowden, the former U.S. spy agency contractor who has been granted asylum by Russia), as he passed through London's Heathrow airport. Greenwald's reaction is here, calling the incident "a failed attempt at intimidation.' A defense lawyer who gained rare access to...
Announcements A prize has been established by the Society of International Economic Law and Cambridge University Press for the best essay submitted on any topic in any field of international economic law. The competition is open to all current undergraduate and graduate students of any university or other tertiary education institution, and those who have graduated from a university or other tertiary education institution no earlier than...
