The United Nations' special envoy for Kosvo proposed last week that Serbia should be partitioned between Serbs and Albanians. The country’s Kosovo region, currently occupied by NATO troops and administered by the U.N. ("UNMIK"), would be severed from Serbia to form a second Albanian state. Serbia naturally opposes this outside interference with what all agree to be its sovereign borders....
Excellent news: Morocco is set to become the first Arab country to formally abolish the death penalty:Morocco will become by the end of April the first Arab state to remove the death penalty from its statute books, the president of the state appointed Consultative Committee on Human Rights, Ben Dhikri, confirmed to Adnkronos International (AKI) on Thursday. He is among...
Amazing images from Radical Cartography. Click to enlarge. Europe has an area of 4.0 million square miles, compared to 9.4 million square miles for North America (3.5 million of which is the United States). ...
Opinio Juris is pleased to welcome Professor Eugene Kontorovich as as guest blogger for the next week or so. Professor Kontorovich is on the faculty of the George Mason Law School, and is currently a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He specializes in public international law, constitutional law, and law and economics. His...
President Chirac of France announced yesterday that France and 46 nations will begin deliberations to replace the United Nations Environmental Programme with a more powerful world environmental body. Coming on the heels of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's recent report on climate change, Chirac called for "the transformation of the UNEP into a genuine international organisation to which...
I have been travelling the last few days, so I missed this strange and potentially disturbing story from the UK's Guardian newspaper. The former president of the European Court of Human Rights, Luzius Wildhaber, alleges that during a three-day visit to Russia last October he was poisoned. This poisoning, he alleges, occurred about the same time as the...
This is one of the coolest graphic tools I have seen in a while. Created by a non-profit group in Stockholm, Gapminder interfaces with Google to permit downloads of active graphical interfaces that display various development indicators. The project is described as follows: It all started in 1998 from an idea to enhance the understanding of world health....
There has been lots of speculation in the legal blogosphere about what Jan Crawford Greenburg knows regarding Justice Stevens' retirement plans. See How Appealing here and Volokh here. Particularly intriguing was Greenburg's comment to Howard that she knows the precise date Stevens plans to retire. Well if she does know, she indicated yesterday that it would not be anytime...
The World Economic Forum drew to a close this week in Davos, Switzerland. Here is my summary of the events: Panel 1: Can't we all get along? Panel 2: We, the masters of the universe, are at the epicentre of the world. Panel 3: Brazilian waxes on about solitary talks of approaching landing strip. Panel 4: Never in the...
Well, sort of. Yoo and co-author Robert Delahunty have a provocative piece in the latest edition of the National Interest ("Lines in the Sand," not available on-line, but you can get it on Lexis) in which they argue against the primacy of the nation-state, or at least the primacy of existing nation-states. The cash-out here, of course,...
Opinio Juris has been selected as part of a Library of Congress program to capture and archive web-based content that is of interest to researchers and the general public. This means that, in addition to being able to find us through the usual internet portals, you will soon be able to find our content at the Library of Congress...
As Julian notes, earlier today the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber I ordered Thomas Lubanga to stand trial on three charges relating to the FPLC's use of child soldiers. Here is the ICC's summary of the charges:The Chamber decided that there is sufficient evidence to establish substantial grounds to believe that Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is criminally responsible as co-perpetrator for the...
