On Wednesday, a court in the UAE sentenced a PhD student at Durham University, Matthew Hedges, to life imprisonment for supposedly "spying" for the British government. There is no evidence to support the spying allegation, and both Hedges and the British government vociferously deny it. By all accounts, Hedges was simply in the UAE to research the country's foreign and...
[Jutta Brunnée is Professor of Law and Metcalf Chair in Environmental Law, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. This essay is based on a keynote presentation given at the annual conference of the Canadian Council on International Law in Ottawa, on November 2, 2018. It draws in part on Jutta Brunnée, “Multilateralism in Crisis,” forthcoming in American Society of International Law,...
[Sam Zarifi is the Secretary General of the International Commission of Jurists.] Prof Harold Hongju Koh in his new book, Trump vs. International Law, has issued an explicit call to arms to American lawyers and bureaucrats to resist Donald Trump’s egregious attempts at dismantling the ‘postwar system of global governance’ and replacing it with ‘a far nastier, more brutish world, less respectful...
[Rita Siemion is International Legal Counsel at Human Rights First.] In his new book, The Trump Administration and International Law, former State Department Legal Advisor and Yale law professor Harold Hongju Koh tackles, among other issues, how to finally end America’s post-9/11 wars. In offering a blueprint for the Trump Administration, Koh hits some important nails right on the head. Most...
[Daphne Eviatar is the Director of Amnesty International USA's Security with Human Rights Program.] Harold Hongju Koh has written an impressive and disturbing account of many of the ways the Trump administration has undermined global institutions and subverted the international rule of law. He also offers some hope for those of us watching with horror as the current administration regularly upends...
[Sean D. Murphy is the Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law at George Washington University.] Harold Hongju Koh has produced an unabashedly progressive manifesto that seeks to explain why it is that many of the initiatives of the early Donald Trump administration relating to transnational affairs have not achieved their objectives, while simultaneously laying out a “counterstrategy of resistance.” To this end, Koh employs...
[Harold Hongju Koh is Sterling Professor of International Law at Yale Law School. He returned to Yale in January 2013 after serving for nearly four years as the 22nd Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State.] The editors of the rebooted Opinio Juris 2.0 and the International Commission of Jurists are most gracious to hold this impressive symposium on my...
To celebrate the launch of our new website and new members, Opinio Juris will be holding a symposium over the next two weeks on Harold Hongju Koh's new book, The Trump Administration and International Law, which was just published by Oxford University Press. (You can get a 20% discount by clicking on the OUP advertisement to the right of this...
The International Commission of Jurists organised a fascinating side-event yesterday at the Human Rights Council. Here is the ICJ's background statement: Particularly when crimes under international law are perpetrated on a large scale in situations of crisis, there is an urgent need to preserve evidence for use in eventual criminal proceedings, whether at the International Criminal Court or other national or...
Much has been made of how relations between the ICC have improved since the second term of Bush the Younger. I think we all expected that to change in the wake of Trump's election, particularly after the OTP announced its intention to investigate detention-related abuses in Afghanistan and in CIA black sites in Eastern Europe For a while, nothing much...
A number of commentators -- including me -- have questioned whether the OTP should open an investigation into Myanmar's treatment of the Rohingya if that investigation would be limited to the crime against humanity of deportation. Here, for example, is what I wrote in April: [T]here is the question of situational gravity. Should the OTP investigate the Rohingya situation if it...
Okay, it didn't directly say that. But that is the logical consequence of the Pre-Trial Chamber's new decision upholding the Court's jurisdiction over the deportation of the Rohingya from Myanmar. According to the PTC (para. 71), the crime against humanity of deportation (unlike forcible transfer) necessarily takes place in two states, because one of the essential elements of the crime...