In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Courts & Tribunals

13 Jul

I want to quickly point to a post from late last month at EJIL: Talk! that I just recently came across. Tolga Yalkin considered the argument that international investment arbitration as a system is fundamentally biased. Considering arguments set out by Professor M. Sornarajah of the University of Singapore, Yalkin wrote: Sornarajah advanced the proposition-enjoying increasing purchase in the international legal community-that bilateral and...

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09 Jul

[Rene Uruena is Assistant Profesor and Director of the international law program at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. He is also a Fellow at the Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research, University of Helsinki.] Last year, Colombian armed forces bombed a guerrilla camp a couple of miles into Ecuadorian territory. After some diplomatic tension at the OAS, everyone made...

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30 Jun

With the Supreme Court term now complete, I thought it would be useful to give a brief year-end review of the Court's decisions. The Supreme Court produced no blockbuster cases this year on any subject related to our discipline. It was truly a sleeper year. There were three cases addressing immunity; two cases addressing asylum, one case...

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26 Jun

It seems likely that Spain is about drastically curtail its universal jurisdiction law--the law that had been used by Magistrate Baltasar Garzon to go after Augusto Pinochet--such that it really won't be universal jurisdiction at all.  While some (many?) of my international law colleagues may view this as a step backwards, I welcome this adjustment as a prudent move that will foster...

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28 May

Professor Thomas M. Franck of NYU passed away on Wednesday afternoon.  (NYU has a page in memoriam, here.) I assume his name is well-known to most, if not all, of the regular readers of Opinio Juris. Suffice it to say that his contributions to the field of international law are staggering, as can be glimpsed from his bio on his faculty page. But a faculty...

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28 Apr

No sooner had I read Peter's thought-provoking post about transparency in arbitration than I received a link to a complete webcast of this month's arbitration before the Permanent Court of Arbitration between the Government of Sudan and the Sudan Peoples Liberation Movement/Army over the Abyei region.  This appears to be the first videotape/webcast of an arbitration between a state and...

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02 Apr

Following-up on my post on Harold Koh's nomination, in the first part of this post I round-up some links to new stories and blog posts on Koh's nomination. Moreover, after the "continue reading" jump there is a guest post from Prof. Anupam Chander of the University of California, Davis (currently visiting at the University of Chicago). In the last day or so,...

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09 Mar

Two genocide bloggers at Change.org, Michelle F. and Michael Bear Kleinman, have been engaged for the past couple of weeks in an impassioned debate over the ICC's arrest warrant for Bashir.  (See here and here, for the most recent installments.)  Michelle, though certainly not unaware of its dangers, supports the warrant.  Kleinman opposes it, blaming the ICC -- like many...

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05 Feb

Sometimes reporters and their editors get caught up in a narrative, and forget to check facts.  In the case of Obama and Bush, every Obama pronouncement is presumed to represent a reversal of Bush policy. But this is simply not true (see, e.g., the predictable and apparently uncontroversial Obama retention of Bush policies on  "extraordinary rendition" and airstrikes in Pakistan).   And so it...

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04 Feb

The ICJ has issued a judgment in the case Maritime Delimitation in the Black Sea (Romania v. Ukraine). At first glance the issue may seem relatively dry: whether Serpents' Island in the Black Sea is an inhabited island or just a rocky outcropping. But the answer to this question affects maritime delimitation lines, which in turn resolves which country has the right to...

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02 Feb

Although prospects of a marriage remain somewhat fanciful, if the ASIL Task Force on U.S. Policy Toward the International Criminal Court has its way, the Obama Administration will take steps to engage with the ICC in a much more positive way than the Bush Administration.  The Task Force issued a press release today, proposing several significant shifts in U.S. policy. ...

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16 Jan

It’s an absurd question, of course, to ask why the environment is more important than human rights. But it’s actually true: protecting, say, endangered sea turtles is far more important than protecting against cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of individuals. At least that is the conclusion if one is examining the question from an international trade perspective. The...

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