In association with the International Commission of Jurists

International Human Rights Law

05 Mar

A recent Lawfare post by Jack Goldsmith noted the appearance of NYU professor Ryan Goodman's controversial new EJIL article, "The Power to Kill or Capture Enemy Combatants." It was followed by an even more provocative summary of it in Slate.  Both pieces have launched a very interesting debate between Goodman, on the one side, and a group of well-known LOAC scholars...

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03 Mar

The win in question concerns the privileged documents the Libyan government seized from Melinda Taylor and her OPCD colleagues while they were meeting with Saif Gaddafi in Libya. In late January, the OPCD asked the Pre-Trial Chamber to order Libya to return the documents and destroy any copies it had made of them. Here is what it argued, as summarized...

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01 Mar

My previous posts (see here for the most recent) have explained why Judge Kozinski's opinion in the Sea Shepherd case wrongly considers a political end to be a private end. In this post I want to highlight what is ironic -- though not technically incorrect -- about Judge Kozinski's conclusion that Sea Shepherd committed an act of piracy on "the...

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01 Mar

As part of my new research interest in China and its relationship with the international legal system, I opened a Sina Weibo account a couple of weeks ago. And it has been quite an adventure. Weibo is China's version of Twitter and Facebook.  Since both Twitter and Facebook are blocked within China, Weibo is the main social media platform for users...

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01 Mar

“It is widely thought that the rapid growth of the international human rights regime has profoundly influenced the practice of written constitutionalism at the national level,” writes David Law and Mila Versteeg in their brilliant article recently published in the NYU Law Review. But is there empirical support for such an assumption? Much to my surprise, their answer is a...

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01 Mar

Eugene Kontorovich has responded at Volokh Conspiracy to my previous post about politically-motivated acts of violence on the high seas. I invite interested readers to examine for themselves the various documents Eugene and I discuss; in this final post I simply want to correct a fundamental error on Eugene's part concerning the Harvard Draft Convention on Piracy -- an error...

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27 Feb

Both Eugene and Maggie disagree with my claim that politically-motivated acts of violence on the high seas were not traditionally considered piracy under international law, but were instead simply criminal acts that the offended state could prosecute as it saw fit. Here is Eugene (my emphasis; combining two comments): The rule is clear as both a matter of customary international law...

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27 Feb

As Julian noted earlier, the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion written by Judge Kozinski, has decided that anti-whaling activism qualifies as piracy if it involves violence against a ship on the high seas. I'm running short for time right now, but I want to briefly respond to Kozinski's key claim about the traditional understanding of piracy's "private ends" requirement (p....

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26 Feb

Some leading Chinese scholars and prominent Chinese activists have been circulating a letter on Chinese social media calling for the National People's Congress (China's legislature) to ratify the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).   Here is an excerpt from the letter, which is carefully worded not to challenge the authority or the accomplishments of the current government. 2....

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23 Feb

That may seem like a ridiculous question. After all, Libya is doing everything in its power to prosecute Saif domestically -- and he is facing a variety of charges that carry the death penalty. But consider the text of Art. 17(2), the "unwillingness" prong of the the admissibility test: In order to determine unwillingness in a particular case, the Court shall...

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