[Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School and the author of Globalizing Transitional Justice (OUP paper2015).] I have learned a great deal from the thoughtful responses to my article (.pdf) by the participants in this symposium. Dinah PoKempner is correct to say that my article doesn’t address the merits of a “right of...
[Chandra Lekha Sriram, Professor of International Law and International Relations and Director, Centre on Human Rights in Conflict, University of East London.] This insightful article covers a great deal of subject matter, far more than can be analysed in a brief comment. These include not only the topics signaled by the title, but also the relationship between transitional justice and international...
[Cesare Romano is Professor of Law, Joseph W. Ford Fellow, and Director of the International Human Rights Clinic at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles. He is also Senior Research Fellow of iCourts, University of Copenhagen, and of Pluricourts, University of Oslo.] Last September, the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, and Timoleón Jiménez, the top commander of the Revolutionary Armed Forces...
[Dinah PoKempner is General Counsel of Human Rights Watch. She is writing in her personal capacity. Views expressed in this essay are not necessarily those of HRW.] Increasing judicial recognition of a duty to investigate and even to prosecute serious violations of international law is unlikely to narrow the ambit of transitional justice; to the contrary, it adds pressure for more...
[Ruti Teitel is the Ernst C Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law, New York Law School and the author of Globalizing Transitional Justice (OUP paper2015).] I am very pleased to participate in this Opinio Juris roundtable on my just-published article Transitional Justice and Judicial Activism: A Right to Accountability? (.pdf), and particularly to engage with Dinah PoKempner, Professors Cesare Romano, Chandra Sriram...
[Jennifer Trahan is Associate Clinical Professor, The Center for Global Affairs, NYU-SPS. She attended ICC ASP 14 on behalf of the American NGO Coalition for the ICC and the American Branch of the International Law Association International Criminal Court Committee. The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of AMICC or the ABILA.] From November 18-27, delegates of states that are parties...
Reports suggest that the Japanese government will resume whaling in the Southern Ocean near Antarctica early next year. This news is causing lots of teeth-gnashing and anger in Australia and New Zealand, whose governments had brought and won a recent International Court of Justice decision finding Japan's previous whaling program in violation of the International Whaling Convention. The news also reveals (again) the...
I've received some very good (though pretty much all critical) comments to my original post defending the consistency of the recently enacted U.S. Space Act with the Outer Space Treaty. I will concede that my reading of the statute and treaty is not exactly a cut and dried simple legal issue. But I think too much of the reporting on the Space...
As I was researching a new essay on complementarity, I stumbled across a fantastic article in the Chinese Journal of International Law by Paidrag McAuliffe, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool School of Law. Here is the abstract of the article, which is entitled "From Watchdog to Workhorse: Explaining the Emergence of the ICC's Burden-sharing Policy as an Example of...
In my post on biological and chemical weapons yesterday, I rejected the idea that Art. 8(2)(b)(xviii) "squarely appl[ies]" (Ralf Trapp) or "plainly applies" (Alex Whiting) to chemical and biological weapons by arguing that the drafters of the Rome Statute intended Art. 8(2)(b)(xviii), the war crime of “[e]mploying asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases,” to have precisely the kind of "special meaning" that Art. 31(4) of...
Simon Lester of Worldtradelaw.net and the Cato Institute offered a very interesting pro-free trade argument against the inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in trade agreements like the TransPacific Partnership or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. I disagree and we discussed and debated the issue today in a lively conversation hosted by Columbia University's Center for Sustainable Investment. ...
Over the past week, two posts at Just Security have argued that the ICC can prosecute the use of chemical and biological weapons as a war crime, even though they -- unlike other types of weapons -- are not mentioned in Article 8 of the Rome Statute. The first post was written by Ralf Trapp, who argued as follows: Furthermore, there are the...
