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...
It's good to be back battling with my fellow co-bloggers. I still owe Chris and Deborah a response on other matters, but let me just briefly respond to Kevin's smart but still not entirely convincing post. It's not that I have any serious rebuttal of Kevin's legal analysis of the Honduras Constitution (and I apologize for my boo-boo on the...
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...
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...
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...
Today it was announced that Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. One cannot fully understand the reason for any Nobel peace award until December 10 (Nobel’s birthday), when the Laureate makes an acceptance speech and the head of the Nobel Committee explains their thinking in conferring the award. The official announcement alludes to the new...
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...
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,...
While I agree with Julian that the interplay of law and politics on questions of statehood can lead to difficult questions, I think his declaration that “we still don’t know when a state is a state,” does more to obscure the issues than actually give a clear picture as to how law and politics affect each other. First of all,...
Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute suggests that the U.S. is endorsing a less than robust view of the right to free expression in a recent Human Rights Council resolution sponsored by the U.S. (along with Egypt). The resolution does appear to give an unusual amount of lip service to the combatting racism and discrimination (given its topic), but it...
Are the two breakaway sections of Georgia (South Ossetia & Abhkazia) states? If not, why is Kosovo a state? The difficulty international lawyers have in answering these questions suggests that the most basic and fundamental questions of international law remain unresolved and deeply contested. What are the requirements for statehood? There are some generally accepted criteria, under international law, but they...
Assuming that the other Circuits follow suit, Roger is almost certainly right that the Second Circuit's recent decision in Talisman Energy "will be the death knell for most corporate liability claims under the Alien Tort Statute." That's regrettable in itself. What's particularly regrettable, though, is that the Second Circuit still has no idea what it's talking about when it comes...
