We at Opinio Juris are very proud that our colleague Duncan Hollis of Temple University Law School was elected on June 15 by the General Assembly of the Organization of American States to the Inter-American Juridical Committee, which ...
AJIL Unbound has just published a fantastic symposium entitled "TWAIL Perspectives on ICL, IHL, and Intervention." The symposium includes an introduction by James Gathii (Loyola-Chicago) and essays by Asad Kiyani (Western), Parvathi Menon (Max Planck), Ntina Tzouvala (Durham), and Corri Zoli (Syracuse). All of the essays are excellent and worth a read, but I want to call special attention to Ntina's essay, which is...
We are pleased to announce that Opinio Juris will begin an occasional series on international law and Presidential politics. Foreign policy and international law have been a central topic of discussion among the U.S. presidential candidates, and there is much fodder for discussion regarding the fidelity of their positions with the United States’ commitments under international law. The...
As I continue to avoid grading my exams, I ran across this interesting recent case (Helmerich & Payne v. Venezuela) from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit which considered whether Venezuela's expropriation of a Venezuelan subsidiary of a U.S. corporation is a "taking in violation of international law" under Section 1605(a)(3) of the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act....
Nearly everyone treats Palestine's membership in the ICC as a done deal; after all, the UN Secretary-General (UNSG) has accepted Palestine's accession to the Rome Statute and the OTP has publicly stated that "since Palestine was granted observer State status in the UN by the UNGA, it must be considered a 'State' for the purposes of accession." But neither the...
The op-ed, which appears in today's New York Times, argues that the ICC is the most appropriate venue for prosecuting ISIS's many international crimes. I have great respect for John, who is unique among former high-ranking US government officials in his willingness to defend the ICC, but the op-ed makes a number of arguments that deserve comment. It certainly makes more...
The Washington Post has a long article today about how Mossad and the CIA collaborated to blow up Hezbollah's chief of international operations in 2008. Here are the key paragraphs: On Feb. 12, 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, walked on a quiet nighttime street in Damascus after dinner at a nearby restaurant. Not far away, a team of CIA spotters in the...
It so happens that I have been researching the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the same time that the Senate has published an alarming report of abuse and torture committed by Americans in the name of national security. Without equating South African apartheid with the Bush Administration's policies and practices, I thought that a few insights from...
I am very rarely shocked, but that was my response to yesterday's editorial in the New York Times by Anthony Romero -- the Executive Director of the ACLU -- arguing that Obama should pre-emptively pardon all of the high-ranking officials responsible for the Bush administration's systematic torture regime at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, Abu Ghraib, various Eastern European black sites, etc. Here is a...
As Thomas Escritt has reported for Reuters, the OTP has declined to open a formal investigation into Israel's attack on the MV Mavi Marmara. I will have much more to say about the decision tomorrow; I agree with the OTP's conclusion but have serious problems with much of its reasoning. But I thought I'd tease tomorrow's post by noting that, despite...
These days, I usually use Twitter to point readers to blog posts that deserve their attention. But Mark Kersten's new post at Justice in Conflict is so good -- and so important -- that I want to highlight it here. The post achieves the near-impossible, passionately indicting Canada's right-wing government for creating a political environment ripe for terrorism without in any way suggesting that...
Bobby Chesney has responded at Lawfare to my most recent post on the CIA and the public-authority justification. It's an excellent response from an exceedingly smart scholar. I still disagree, but Bobby's post really hones in on the differences between us. I'll leave it to readers to decide who has the better of the argument. I do, however, want to discuss...
