In a roundup of some of the big news coming out of the US elections, President Barack Obama was elected to serve a second term, the Republicans have kept control of the House of Representatives and the Democrats still control the Senate, Maine and Maryland have legalized same-sex marriage and Washington state and Colorado voted to legalize marijuana for all...
This week, state delegates to the Sixth (Legal) Committee of the UN have been debating the most politically sensitive topic of the latest International Law Commission‘s (ILC) report: Head of State Immunity from criminal jurisdiction. The topic is sensitive for several reasons. First, it raises the question of whether there should be exceptions to immunity for serious crimes. In this regard...
The United States heads to the polls today to choose a second term for President Obama or to put Mitt Romney in the Oval Office. It may be election day in the US, but Bloomberg has a profile of Xi Jinping, who will most likely be chosen to replace Chinese President Hu Jintao later this month. Amnesty has reported that Malawi's Justice minister has suspended...
As everyone gets a little weary from the blizzard of last-week polls in the lead-up to the election itself, it's not surprising that pollsters have widened their scope to measure the preferences of non-Americans outside the United States. The result: overwhelming for Obama. (The only country in which Romney bests Obama is Pakistan.) Though perhaps not exactly rocket science, Joseph Stiglitz...
European and Asian leaders are meeting in Laos for the biennial Asia-Europe meeting. Violence between rival militias in Libya underscores the security challenges facing the new government. A grenade attack on a church in Kenya on Sunday is believed to have been the work of a Somali group protesting against Kenya's involvement in the UN-backed force in Somalia. A new cabinet has been formed in Somalia, includes the...
Upcoming Events Next weekend, the Whitney R. Harris World Law Institute is organizing a conference entitled "The International Criminal Court at 10". The program is available here, and you can register via this link. The SHARES Seminar: Principles of Shared Responsibility in International Law will take place in Amsterdam on February 7-8, 2013. There is limited room for inclusion of academic experts...
[William S. Dodge is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on the amicus brief of the United States to the Fourth Circuit...
This week on Opinio Juris, our thoughts are with our US East Coast readers affected by Superstorm Sandy. We hope you and your loved ones are safe and sound. Posting was light this week because of the storm, which forced us to postpone a symposium on Duncan Hollis' edited volume, The Oxford Guide to Treaties, to next week. But Sandy also provided inspiration...
I subscribe to the new conventional wisdom that Tuesday's result won't be close, but who knows? If it is, there's always the chance that voters among the 6+ million U.S. citizens living outside the United States will decide the election. Non-resident U.S. citizens are entitled under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act to cast absentee ballots in "the last place...
An Israeli censor has allowed the publication of an interview with the commando who killed the PLO's Abu Jihad in 1988. International human rights groups have welcomed China's decision to introduce a new organ donation system that will no longer rely on organs of executed prisoners. Sri Lanka has been pressed at the UN to prosecute war crimes. Jurist highlights the International Commission of Jurists'...
I blogged late last year about the UK Court of Appeal's judgment in Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs v. Rahmatullah, which implicitly repudiated a little-known OLC memo written by Jack Goldsmith that concluded “operatives of international terrorist organizations” are not “protected persons” for purposes of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention -- a provision that prohibits...
The annual CCIL conference in Ottawa is just around the corner. The program this year is fantastic (as always). Here is an overview from Prof. Fannie Lafontaine, one of the co-chairs: From the financial turmoil in Europe and the environmental disasters in Haiti and Japan to the surge for democracy in the Middle East and the resulting civil strife, international...
