On top of everything else, Congress now threatens to severely restrict official contacts with Iran. This from Heather Hurlburt at Democracy Arsenal: If you're too transfixed by the prospect of the US losing its seat on the IAEA board of governors, losing Japanese funding through UNESCO for police training in Afghanistan, and potentially losing global patent protection, all...
This is a terrific book which ploughs much virgin territory. The dust jacket blurb describes it accurately as providing the “first comprehensive legal analysis of the twelve war crimes trials held in the American zone of occupation between 1946 and 1949, collectively known as the Nuremberg Military tribunals (NMTs).” It is not the only material on the topic...
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to cancel her visit to London today for the much-hyped cybersecurity conference, which was designed to push back against Russian and Chinese proposals for an "International Code of Conduct for Information Security." The Russian/Chinese proposal (co-authored with Uzbekistan and Tajikistan) is widely undestood as part of an effort to (1) move Internet governance away...
In a brief chapter titled "Legacy" Kevin Jon Heller opens up the issue of the influence of the Nuremberg Military tribunals (NMTs) on the later development of the international law of war. This contribution will expand on that chapter. First, it discusses the effect of the trials on the later behavior of nations and individuals. Did it deter potential criminal...
Although the twelve U.S. Nuremberg trials judged seven times as many defendants as the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and addressed a broader spectrum of international criminal law issues, including the first genocide prosecutions and the establishment of important principles of medical ethics, they have wallowed in comparative historical obscurity. The absence of meaningful coverage is ironic given, as Kevin...
Today is an historic day in world population statistics, marking the day that planet reaches seven billion inhabitants. What is amazing is, despite the phenomenal growth in population, the citizens of the world are becoming healthier and wealthier every year. Gapminder has an incredibly interesting timeline that shows the progression of life expectancy (y axis) and income per...
I am deeply grateful to both my co-bloggers at Opinio Juris and the editors of EJIL: Talk! – particularly my friends Marko Milanovic and Dapo Akande – for this remarkable opportunity to discuss my new book. I look forward to hearing what the impressive, and frankly intimidating, group of commenters have to say about it. I wrote this book for one...
Opinio Juris and EJIL: Talk! are happy to announce that we will be hosting two joint book discussions. The first book is OJ's own Kevin Heller's The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (Oxford UP). That discussion starts today. We have a fantastic lineup of discussants, to whom we are most grateful for their time...
I have just returned from teaching international humanitarian law in Nairobi. Two al-Shabaab grenade attacks not far from my hotel notwithstanding, it was one of the greatest professional experiences of my life. The training was organized by the Brussels-based International Association of Professionals in Humanitarian Assistance and Protection (PHAP), in conjunction with the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict...
Ruti Teitel’s new book, Humanity’s Law, is an ambitious effort to make sense of the international legal landscape of our post-Cold War, post-9/11 world. Rejecting formalist distinctions between legal paradigms, she sketches out a bold synthesis of recent legal trends away from a state-centered understanding of international law and toward an international legal order in which individuals are the key...
Der Spiegel Online reports that in the wake of the eurozone debt deal reached by European leaders last week, the German Constitutional Court has issued a temporary injunction against the Merkel government implementing its obligations until the court has ruled on whether the nature of the parliamentary action is lawful: Germany's Federal Constitutional Court on Friday expressed doubts about the legality of...
The hacker – a government, a lone individual, a non-state group – stealing valuable intellectual property or exploring infrastructure control systems could be sitting in Romania, China, or Nigeria, and the assault could transit networks across several continents. Calls are therefore growing for a global treaty to help protect against cyber threats. As a step in that direction, the British government is convening next week the London Conference on Cyberspace to promote new norms of cybersecurity and the free flow of information via digital networks. International diplomacy like this among states and private stakeholders is important and will bring needed attention to these issues. But the London summit is also likely to expose major fault lines, not consensus, on the hardest and most significant problems. The idea of ultimately negotiating a worldwide, comprehensive cybersecurity treaty is a pipe dream. Different interests among powerful states – stemming from different strategic priorities, internal politics, public-private relationships and vulnerabilities – will continue to pull them apart on how cyberspace should be used, regulated, and secured. With the United States and European democracies at one end and China and Russia at another, states disagree sharply over such issues as whether international laws of war and self-defense should apply to cyber attacks, the right to block information from citizens, and the roles that private or quasi-private actors should play in Internet governance. Many emerging Internet powers and developing states lie between these poles, while others are choosing sides.Segal and Waxman point out not only ways in which a treaty regime is likely an instance of overreaching that, were anyone actually to rely on it, is likely to fail. They go on to present a positive agenda of steps that states can take in order to develop what amount to state practices aimed at consolidating looser norms of state behavior and best practices of states, without reaching to a treaty regime.
