In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

14 Oct

Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School (and occasional Opinio Juris guest-blogger) has sent in the following call for questions/ topics for a roundtable at International Law Weekend entitled Overlapping Threats / Overlapping Jurisdictions: International Law in the Face of New Threats to Peace and Security. She writes: Climate change, swine flu, the global financial crisis, and drug trafficking pose significant...

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14 Oct

The Washington Post reports that a prominent Democratic fundraiser and close ally of Senator John Kerry (chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) is seeking to be permitted to lobby on behalf of the current Sudanese government.  This may seem a little weird, and even morally distasteful, but it is another logical consequence of the engagement strategy.  As the hopeful...

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12 Oct

I had the good fortune to be invited to lecture to Jack Goldsmith's class on Cyberwar and Cybercrime at Harvard Law School last week to discuss my arguments for why we need new international law rules for cyberconflicts.  While there, a student flagged for me a new journal--the Harvard National Security Journal--that's literally and figuratively coming on-line right now.  Here's how their web-page...

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12 Oct

Charli Carpenter has an interesting short commentary over at RFE/RFL discussing the recently released fact-finding report on the Georgia-Russia war.  I have not had a chance to read the report, so I won't comment myself (I said something about my experiences as a human rights monitor of the early 1990s phase of the civil war, and then followed up with...

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10 Oct

I have no expertise in this area, so I'm not going to opine on the legality of Zelaya's ouster.  Two things, however, are worth noting.  First, the report that Julian mentions was not written by the Congressional Research Service -- a mistake that others on the right have made.  It was written by the Law Library of Congress.  Second, the...

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10 Oct

Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina weighs in today with a WSJ oped blasting the Obama Administration's policy toward Honduras. Putting aside the merits of DeMint's analysis for the time being, I found his oped interesting for two reasons: one having to do with DeMint's somewhat sketchy actions, and the other with Harold Koh's potentially sketchy legal advice. 1) "One Voice"? DeMint is...

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10 Oct

I don't usually plug products on the blog, but I'm going to make an exception for the Ectaco C-Pen 20, the pen scanner that I've been using to organize the research for my book on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: I don't know how others work, but I write a very detailed outline of an article and then cut-and-paste all...

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09 Oct

This video from Anne Bayefsky of the Human Rights Council meetings on the Goldstone Report is fascinating (though I am not on board with her over-the-top attack on Goldstone personally).   But note the indiscriminate and  deeply hypocritical use of the words "genocide," "war crimes," and "crimes against humanity" by the least morally attractive member states of the HRC (How...

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08 Oct

I've posted lots here about targeted killing, and written about it for publication, as well.  I'll be on NPR's All Things Considered today, in a story by correspondent Ari Shapiro, talking about targeted killings in relation to detention and interrogation.  (Now that I've seen the story, I see with pleasure that it also quotes Matthew Waxman, Vijay Padmanabhan, John Bellinger,...

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