I returned ten days ago from a week of teaching international humanitarian law in Jericho. It was my first time in the West Bank, and I won't soon forget it. I was particularly struck, not surprisingly, by the limitations on Palestinian life and movement -- the endless checkpoints, the hideous wall, the massive illegal settlements dotting the landscape....
[Claude Bruderlein is the director of the Harvard Program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research] The deteriorating security situation in Syria has had dramatic consequences on the civilian population. While the international community debates different ways to respond to the violence against civilians and the rising humanitarian needs, a growing tension has emerged around the means and methods to provide...
I am teaching IHL in Jericho this week, so I don't have as much time as I'd like to weigh in on the increasingly surreal debate over whether the right of self-defense in Article 51 of the UN Charter permits the U.S. or Israel to attack a country that does not have nuclear weapons, could not build a nuclear weapon...
I expect the legal issues arising out of a possible attack on Iran's nuclear facilities are going to get hotter in the coming weeks. Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution offers this argument in favor of the legality of Israel's attack drawing from the doctrine of "preemptive" self defense (h/t Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare). The charter of the United Nations affirms...
It's difficult to accuse these guys of being soft on Tehran, so it's hard to quibble with their conclusion: The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb. The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has...
Here's an actual headline from Fox Nation, part of that fair and balanced news organization we all know and love: Sovereignty's a bitch, isn't it?...
There has been much debate the past couple of days about whether the bomb attacks that have killed at least three Iranian nuclear scientists since 2010 qualify as terrorism. Glenn Greenwald and Kevin Drum on the left and Andrew Sullivan on the right say "yes"; many of their readers (see Greenwald here) and the editor of Technology Review say "no." ...
This post will seem like an extended plug for my own work, so apologies. But I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the legal issues raised by Ruti's excellent post, the politics of which -- with one exception, noted below -- I completely share. First, Ruti asks whether Libya should be able to claim the right to try to Saif...
My friend and PhD supervisor Carsten Stahn has posted a very interesting discussion of Libya and the ICC at the Hague Justice Portal. Here is a taste: One possible option to reconcile domestic jurisdiction with accountability before the ICC may be a division of labor based on temporal jurisdiction. In line with the Council referral, the ICC enjoys ...
Lord knows I can't stand Mitt Romney. And I have never bought the idea that Ahmadinejad has committed direct and public incitement of genocide through his inflammatory anti-Israel rhetoric. But this Mother Jones article is still staggeringly awful: When asked about Iran and Israel at Tuesday's CNN national security debate, on-and-off Republican front-runner Mitt Romney replied in his typically tough, ...
Most commentators have assumed -- Julian included -- that Libya has an obligation under the Rome Statute to surrender Saif Gaddafi to the ICC before it can challenge the admissibility of the case against him. At The Multilateralist today, David Bosco quotes a UN diplomat who believes that Libya can challenge admissibility without first surrendering Saif: [Y]esterday, an extremely well informed...
As readers may know, Israel's Knesset is currently considering two laws designed to prevent foreign governments and international organizations from funding progressive Israel human-rights groups: one that drastically limits the amount of funding such groups could receive, and one that imposes a tax of nearly 50% on foreign funds received by human-rights groups that do not receive Israeli funding (i.e.,...
