Early reports suggest that Costa Rican voters have narrowly approved Costa Rica's accession to the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Costa Rica is the only party to CAFTA that has submitted the agreement to a referendum. Such up or down votes on free trade deals rarely occur through the referendum process. Indeed, treaties and other international agreements almost never...
Here's a strange case I came across that I thought you might enjoy. It seems one Quintin Littlejohn had his own ideas about how to handle the situation in Kosovo and was upset with how the International Court of Justice was hijacking his issue. So he sues the ICJ. Here is an excerpt of the decision of...
Now this is a heartwarming picture depicting the presidents of Honduras and Nicaragua in a friendly embrace, a far cry from the tense days of the Contra Wars in the 1980s, which involved Honduran and U.S. support for Nicaraguan rebels. Indeed, things have gotten so friendly that both Presidents have pledged to meet at the site of the disputed border area...
Remember the killer badgers and cyborg spy squirrels? Well, as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Consider the following report from the EE Times:Cyborg insects with embedded microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) will run remotely controlled reconnaissance missions for the military, if its '"HI-MEMS" program succeeds. Hybrid-Insect MEMS--a program hatched earlier this year at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency...
I am part of a wonderful international arbitration listserve and in the past couple of days there has been an interesting exchange regarding whether international arbitrators or international judges are more prone to bias. One prominent academic at the London School of Economics had this to say: I see it more as a matter of established principle than theory that...
What? You thought the Korean War ended fifty years ago? Actually, the Panmunjom Agreement, concluded on June 27, 1953, was merely an armistice agreement. It provided for a cease-fire and created a military demarcation line between North and South Korea. It did not, however, provide any terms for normalizing relations among the participants, which is what a...
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea are being webcast live. Check it out! ...
YouTube is everywhere. Politicians use it for campaign ads. Bands use it to promote their new music. I use it to keep abreast of The Colbert Report, which is shamefully absent from New Zealand television. And now international prosecutors are using it to collect evidence:Prosecutors in the case against former Bosnian army chief Rasim Delic this...
The NYT is running a very long expose on secret legal opinions by the Office of Legal Counsel endorsing many harsh interrogation techniques that many had believed were prohibited by prior OLC opinions and the McCain Amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act. The article paints the current OLC Chief, Steven Bradbury, as a shill for the Bush Administration by...
The U.S. State Department is really getting into this blog thing. This week, they launched their first official blog "Dipnote." (Apparently, this is short for "diplomatic note" in diplomatese). According to its first post, the State Department is "hoping to start a dialogue with the public. More than ever, world events affect our daily lives--what we see and hear, what...
The Ninth Circuit has rendered another fascinating case on the use of the political question doctrine by corporations that allegedly aid and abet international law violations. In Corrie v. Caterpillar, plaintiffs alleged numerous violations of international law against Caterpillar arising from the bulldozing by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) of Palestinian homes. According to plaintiffs' complaint, Caterpillar sold the...
I've lost track of exactly how many times North Korea has announced that it has agreed to dismantle its nuclear program, but here we go again. North Korea agrees to disable all existing nuclear facilities" ...
