The Office of Science and Technology Policy released last week the new "National Space Policy of the United States." According to the Washington Post, the new space policy, which supersedes a 1996 Clinton-era space policy, envisions a greater role for the military in outer space. Here are some of the new policy's fundamental principles, a number of which...
See this report here; pretty sketchy, without any elaboration from the Mexican government. It’s not easy to come up with an international law argument against a border fence, although one would assume a human rights basis (especially as combined with empirical evidence of resulting deaths from border smuggling moved into more inhospitable terrain). It wouldn’t seem that there’s...
I was at a recent event that involved a discussion with a federal appeals court judge regarding the interpretation of treaties in federal courts. One of the cases under discussion involved interpretation of a particular phrase in a well-known treaty. This particular judge is an extremely thoughtful, erudite, and scholarly judge. When someone in the room raised...
These days the UN General Assembly is discussing the adoption of a declaration calling for an immediate moratorium on deep-sea bottom trawl fishing on the high seas, at least until legally-binding regimes for the effective conservation and management of fisheries and the protection of biodiversity on the high seas can be developed, implemented and enforced. The measure has been proposed...
Over at National Security Advisors, my friend Tung Yin has a post about the sentencing of Lynne Stewart to 28 months in prison for allegedly conspiring with Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman to help him transmit messages from prison to his followers. Though Tung praises the judge's refusal to impose the absurd 20-year sentence the government requested, he seems...
OK, I guess election battles for Security Council seats don’t amount to no-holds-bar extreme fighting but this one is pretty heated as far UN politicking goes. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has set his sights on this seat. Even though it is a rotating seat on the fifteen-member Council, and thus without a veto, it can still provide added political...
Opinio Juris warmly welcomes Betsy Andersen as the new Executive Director for the American Society of International Law. We are delighted that Betsy has agreed to be interviewed to introduce her to our readers. Having spent several hours this weekend at a colloquium discussing the future of the ASIL with Betsy Andersen and ASIL President Jose Alvarez, I left...
We are delighted to have Cesare Romano joining us as a guest for the next two weeks. Cesare is Associate Professor of Law at Loyola Law School - Los Angeles. Between 1997 and 2006, he was the guiding force behind the Project on International Courts and Tribunals. You can find his latest paper on a compulsory paradigm for...
Although I can't seem to find a version online, the U.N. Security Council appears to have agreed unanimously on a new resolution imposing sanctions and an inspections regime on North Korea. According to the NYT, the tough new resolution "authorizes all countries to inspect cargo going in and out of North Korea to detect illicit weapons." As far as I...
Paul Caron over at TaxProf Blog has posted on law professor blogs that have "juice." We are among the "juiciest" law blogs. The "Blog Juice Calculator" he relies upon is used to determine whether a blog is a good candidate for selling advertisement space. ...
It's official: the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Mohammed Yunnus and Grameen Bank for work promoting microfinance as a tool for economic development. Yunnus and Grameen join an impressive list of past laureates. Online betting odds had favored Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (at 3-1 odds), according to one site, and Finnish ex-President Martti Ahtisaari (at...
The ICTR began last month the trial of Simon Bikindi, (indictment), who is accused of six counts of genocide, for writing and recording popular songs that, according to his indictment, incited and encouraged genocide. (Articles by Guardian, Reuters, BBC, and VoA.) Bikindi had earned himself the nickname "Rwanda's Michael Jackson" (presumably for the popularity of his songs). The Prosecutor...
