In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Courts & Tribunals

29 Mar

A depressingly large number of U.S. media outlets are covering the Italian Supreme Court's decision to order a new trial in the case against Amanda Knox, the American exchange student charged with murdering her British roommate in Italy. Knox was convicted in trial court, but that conviction was overturned on appeal. I say depressing because this is hardly the most significant...

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26 Mar

Just in case there was any doubt, the Philippines-China arbitration over the South China Sea will go forward.  International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea President Shunji Yanai has appointed a second arbitrator. The [Philippines] Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) confirmed on Monday that the Itlos president, Judge Shunji Yanai, appointed Polish Itlos Judge Stanislaw Pawlak to the panel last...

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19 Feb

Breaking news:  China has rejected arbitration under Annex VII of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea with the Philippines, dealing a heavy blow to the future of dispute settlement under UNCLOS (h/t China Law Prof Blog).  According to this China Daily report, "Chinese Ambassador to the Philippines Ma Keqing had an appointment with officials from the Philippines' Foreign...

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16 Feb

As far as I can tell, the Chinese government continues to pretend as if the Philippines' Law of the Sea arbitration claim doesn't exist.  Articles like this one suggest the Philippines government continues to wait for some official or unofficial Chinese response.  The February 22 deadline for China to appoint an arbitrator is fast approaching. There are obviously bigger things going...

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16 Feb

I used to blog regularly about the Whale Wars, my name for the ongoing struggle between Japanese Whalers and those groups devoted to protecting whales.  But I stopped almost three years ago when Australia filed its case against Japan in the ICJ, since nothing important seems to have happened since then.  (Did we really need 22 months for written proceedings, when...

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12 Feb

Apparently, the U.S. conservative policymaking world has made its peace with the ICC.  As long as the ICC doesn't bother the US, the US won't bother the ICC.  But the US has no plans to join either.  That is the bottom line from this report from Colum Lynch. Have U.S. conservatives really lost the war on the International Criminal Court? A decade...

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12 Feb

Neither the arbitral tribunal's order demanding Ecuador act to stop enforcement of the $18 Billion judgment against Chevron, nor Ecuador's continued brazen refusal to follow the order is really much a surprise. The Chevron-Ecuador Death Cage Match continues unabated and has gotten so out of control that almost nothing shocks me about this case anymore.  A former Ecuadorian judge swearing...

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08 Feb

I have posted on SSRN my latest article, "Ancillary Discovery to Prove Denial of Justice" just published in the Virginia Journal of International Law. It analyzes Section 1782 discovery proceedings in the context of BIT arbitration and argues that there is now uniform agreement among federal courts that investment arbitration panels are "international tribunals" within the meaning of Section...

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27 Jan

For those of you wondering how seriously the Chinese media is taking the Philippines' arbitration claim against China over the South China Sea (there must be at least two of you out there), here is an illustrative cartoon from a Chinese newspaper, "JingChu Times", in Central China (although originally from another publication). Although one doesn't need to read Chinese to get...

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