President Obama emerged from his campaign bunker to face the press, and he issued what the NYT seems to think is a pretty serious military threat against Syria. “We cannot have a situation in which chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Mr. Obama said in response to questions at an impromptu news conference at...
I've been trapped in an August blogging-slump. But I am roused to my keyboard by the surge of territorial disputes in Asia. China has aggressively asserted ever stronger and more expansive claims in the South China Sea, sparking dissension amongst the Association for Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and serious protests in Vietnam and the Philippine. China, Taiwan, and Japan are...
Julian Assange has thanked Ecuador's president Rafael Correa for the "courage he has shown" in granting him political asylum in his first public appearance from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. While Britain still denies Assange safe passage from London, Correa chastised the UK for their threats to storm the embassy to remove Assange, calling them "vulgar, inconsiderate and intolerable." He also...
Fresh off the failure of the Arms Trade Treaty -- aka The UN's Secret Plan to Disarm the Defenders of Freedom and Enslave Mankind -- Google has released an amazing new tool that maps global flows of light weapons and ammunition. Here is how the Huffington Post describes the tool: The Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), a Norwegian initiative focused on...
Call for Papers The African International Economic Law Network has issued a call for papers for its upcoming conference taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa, March 7-8, 2013: "Trade Governance: Integrating Africa into the World Economy Through International Economic Law." The call can be found here; anonymous abstracts of no more than 300 words are due by September 7, 2012. The International Review...
A friend of mine asked me that question the other day. Imagine that a non-state actor (NSA) had both a legislative branch that enacted criminal laws and a functioning criminal-justice system that prosecuted violations of those laws. Could the NSA challenge the admissibility of a case pending at the ICC on the ground that it was already investigating or prosecuting...
For the love of God, is it really too much to ask for reporters to do five minutes of research before they write about international law? See if you can spot the mistake in this article about Britain's silly threat to invade the Ecuadorian embassy to arrest Julian Assange: Ecuador has said it may appeal to the International Criminal Court (ICC)...
News sites and blogs are full of condemnation for what appears to be an excessive sentence for the political protest/stunt pulled by the Russian punk band Pussy Riot in an Orthodox church earlier this year. (Even President Putin had hoped the group would not be judged "too harshly.") Over at the CLR Forum, my St. John's colleague Mark Movsesian, who...
The big news yesterday was that Ecuador granted WikiLeaks' founder, Julian Assange, political asylum, angering Britain. Swedish and British authorities are critical of the decision, while UK authorities are refusing to grant Assange safe passage out of London. One of Assange's attorneys, Baltazar Garzon, has entertained the idea of taking this dispute between Ecuador and the UK to the International Court...
Militants have attacked Pakistan's nuclear air base which houses US F-16 fighters and about 100 nuclear warheads. The Organization on Islamic Co-operation has suspended Syria over the violent repression of the political protests, although there was no support for an external military intervention. A political and media advisor to Syria's Assad is visiting Beijing where she has praised China and Russia for not being colonizers. A UN Independent Commission...
In Syria, fresh clashes have broken out in Damascus and Aleppo, even though the defected Prime Minister Hijab has said the regime is close to collapse. Human Rights Watch reports that fighter planes have struck a hospital in Aleppo, while Reuters provides an exclusive about Libyan fighters joining the rebel forces. US Defense Secretary Panetta has accused Iran of supporting pro-Assad militias...
It's been a slow blogging week, so I think I can get away with a completely self-serving post about the awesomeness of Melbourne. And yes, Melbourne is awesome. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Livability Survey says so -- again: 1. Melbourne 2. Vienna 3. Vancouver 4. Toronto 5. Calgary 5. Adelaide 7. Sydney 8. Helsinki 9. Perth 10. Auckland The survey assesses 140 cities on factors in five categories: stability, healthcare,...
