In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

08 Sep

There are some interesting comments in the live blog of the UNCTAD International Investment Agreements Conference from the likes of Todd Weiler, Susan Franck, and Jason Yackee. (You can also watch the proceedings here). Much substance in the coverage, but also some fun. Here's a taste: Todd Weiler: As I see Prof Franck is performing the live blog function,...

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08 Sep

No doubt many readers have seen the press articles announcing George Soros' gift of $100 million to Human Rights Watch.  Most interesting to me was that the gift is aimed, in part, at diversifying the organization, staff, and board away from its current US-centric arrangement.  As the AP puts it:

But the money also is meant to make its donor base as international as its outlook. Plans call for Human Rights Watch to draw at least half its income and most of its board members from outside the U.S. within five years. Now, about 70 percent of the money and 80 percent of the board members are U.S.-based.

Soros considers that a liability -- one he blamed on a frequent target of his, former President George W. Bush.

"They're basically an American organization advocating human rights all over the world. But the United States has lost the moral high ground, during the Bush administration, and, therefore, it runs into opposition because there's resentment of American interference," Soros said in an interview in his sleek office in a midtown Manhattan high-rise. " ... It's a drawback, to be American in this context."

HRW agrees, although it already believes it is seen as independent of the US government.

"But it is helpful for our organization to personify the global values we promote," Executive Director Kenneth Roth said.

I wonder if it is quite so easy to personify global values in that way, however.  Multinational corporations, for example, often talk about how global they are, in outlook, in values, in all those ways.  Query whether it actually works that way in MNEs.  The Daimler-Benz model, for example, in which it was supposed to be a merger of equals between the American car company and the German one.  Under a surface veneer of the "global" company, in fact the true owners of the enterprise, Daimler, quickly asserted itself, and for a simple reason - the post-merger was turning into a disaster, and the immediate response was for management to seek to reduce its internal transaction and agency costs by asserting a command and control decisionmaking model that relied upon one side of the enterprise.  That is, a "mixed" culture inside an enterprise is a costly one in terms of many decisionmaking factors, because it invites much more negotiation inside.  

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07 Sep

I have no desire to have the final word with Ken.  But I would like answers to two questions. First, where does Melzer or the ICRC say that armed conflict is a geographically-bounded concept, such that a participant in an armed conflict ceases to be targetable as soon as he leaves the battlefield?  I cited pages in Melzer's book on targeted...

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07 Sep

Re the Volokh post to which Kevin refers below. Fear not, I was not trying to withhold content from OJ readers, but it did seem to me that I was days late in arriving at the issue that Ben and Kevin had already been discussing, whereas my VC post went into a lot of other stuff that didn't strike me as relevant to OJ readers.  Although we are pretty eclectic in our tastes here, as my personal drone post shows, I've sometimes had email complaints from readers wondering what the connection to international law is re some post of mine.  Am I wrong about that among our readers?  But anyway, my fundamental motivation in posting it to VC and then linking back to the OJ discussion was blog-strategic - drive some traffic over to OJ from Volokh.  I'm not trying to deprive OJ or its readers of my 'invaluable' thoughts. Very quickly as to substance in one matter of Kevin's response.  Kevin says I'm offering a caricature of Nils' view on territoriality and armed conflict.  Maybe.  But what Kevin calls caricature, I'd say is a reasonable statement in a couple of paragraphs on a blog of the center of Nils', and the ICRC's, views.  That's not a criticism.  There is a lot to be said for the view that armed conflict has geographical limits on it.  The ICRC, if I may summarize, or caricature, as you will, reached this view on the perfectly sensible and understandable grounds of its alarm over the Bush administration's Global War on Terror claims.  I think that the GWOT reached too far - as I have said many places, in my view - once again, a summary or caricature, as you will - what the Bush administration sought was the tail of law wagging the dog of war, the ability to use the law of war anywhere in the world with or without actual hostilities. The ICRC unsurprisingly became alarmed at this, and has - including through Nils' work - moved to a largely geographically based view of armed conflict.  I understand and sympathize with the reasons, in part because I share them and in part because even where I don't share the final conclusion and come to a different view, I do try to start with a sympathetic view to the argument and understand it on its own terms.  The sympathetic read of that argument is that the Bush administration wanted a global war in order to invoke the law of armed conflict anywhere, at any time, but without any connection to actual hostilities.  As I say, I reach a different view - different from the GWOT view or Nils' view, but I think I am starting from a position of seeking to understand it.  And for that matter, one of the reasons I think I understand it as a "large" view in the law of war is that some of the senior ICRC staff deliberately reached out to me for exactly the same reason - they heard what Koh was saying, what I was saying, what different people were saying, and they were admirably trying very hard to understand the positions and how they differed from their own.
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07 Sep

I've got a new draft article on cyberthreats (you can download it at SSRN here).  I'd planned to wait before blogging about it, but events have overtaken my plans since Orin Kerr and Dave Hoffman are already discussing my ideas over at Concurring Opinions.  So, let me offer some responses to their questions here, and in the process explain (a) why some...

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07 Sep

Thanks to the independence of two independents -- Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who come from conservative electorates.  That, my friends, is putting the good of the country ahead of short-term political interest. Go Julia!  And thank you, Tony and Rob, for sparing us from three years of Tony Abbott....

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06 Sep

I have no idea why Ken posted his thoughts on the Washington Post editorial only at Volokh Conspiracy, but I wanted to respond to his post, because I think it is based on a critical misapprehension of the laws of war.  Here are the relevant paragraphs (my emphasis): [G]oing to the geographic definition of war as a legal concept.  This idea...

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06 Sep

The day approaches when everyone will have their own drone.  I think I'd like this a Christmas present.  Behold the Parrot.AR ipod-itouch-ipad controlled drone - available for pre-order at Amazon, coming out later this year. [caption id="attachment_13277" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="The Parrot Drone"][/caption]...

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06 Sep

Ben Wittes calls attention today to a Washington Post editorial defending the targeted killing of American citizens like Al-Aulaqi: [W]hen a target is hiding in a lawless state or in one which refuses to cooperate in his apprehension, other alternatives must be considered, including targeted strikes. The decision to target an American must be a last resort, used...

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05 Sep

Via BLDGBLOG and Pruned (1, 2), here are two suggestions that are not so much literal proposals but rather thought experiments, each meant to prod the viewer. (And a third one from me.) The first is one of the winners of SeaChange 2030+, an "ideas competition" sponsored by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects with the goal of addressing the effects of...

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03 Sep

Julian noted a couple of days ago that the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights have challenged the Obama administration's "asserted authority to carry out ‘targeted killings’ of U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism far from any field of armed conflict.”  The lawsuit claims, inter alia, that such killings violate the due-process rights of the targeted citizens. As Anthony Romero...

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