Great news -- an appeals court in Ecuador has upheld the $18 billion damages award imposed on Chevron for the damage caused by its deliberate dumping of more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste-water in the country, known as the "Rainforest Chernobyl": The lawsuit deals with pollution of the rainforest by energy company Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001. Chevron...
This post will seem like an extended plug for my own work, so apologies. But I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the legal issues raised by Ruti's excellent post, the politics of which -- with one exception, noted below -- I completely share. First, Ruti asks whether Libya should be able to claim the right to try to Saif...
The OTP is seeking an arrest warrant for Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein, the Sudanese Defence Minister, in connection with a number of attacks on civilians in Darfur between August 2003 and March 2004. The request alleges that Hussein is responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the attacks, but does not include a genocide charge. According to Bill...
A group of distinguished Nuremberg scholars, including myself (minus the distinguished part), have filed an amicus brief in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum on behalf of the petitioners. The brief argues that although the Nuremberg trials themselves did not involve the prosecution of juridical persons such as corporations, a wide variety of Allied actions outside of judicial fora indicate that...
The Court of Appeal judgment orders the UK government to seek the release of Yunus Rahmatullah, an alleged member of Lashkar-e-Taiba who has been detained at Bagram since 2004, from U.S. custody. What is particularly interesting about the decision is that it directly -- though implicitly -- rejects a little-known memo written by Jack Goldsmith while he was at the...
Ashley Deeks, a fellow at Columbia and a former member of the Office of the Legal Adviser, has posted an essay on SSRN -- forthcoming in the Virginia Journal of International Law -- entitled "Unwilling or Unable: Toward an Normative Framework for Extra-Territorial Self-Defense." Here is the abstract: Non-state actors, including terrorist groups, regularly launch attacks against states, often...
Was the Durban climate conference a success or failure? As always, the answer depends on one's frame of reference. As compared to the expectations going in, the outcome was more than I think most people thought possible. In a pre-Durban paper entitled "W[h]ither the Kyoto Protocol," I identified three scenarios: (1) business-as-usual, with modest progress in developing the Copenhagen/Cancun framework and...
That's the question asked by my friends at Wronging Rights, in response to a recent article in Time: TIME claims to have obtained an internal ICC memo showing that the Court is "compiling evidence of possible recent war crimes in southern Sudan, allegedly directed by Sudanese Defense Minister Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein." Apparently, in addition to the Prosecutor's request...
I am very grateful to Kal Raustiala, Peggy McGuinness, Austen Parrish and Sarah Cleveland for taking the time to read my book – and I’m even happier that they liked it. They each make a number of important points, and I’ll now take the opportunity to respond to some of them. Kal is right in saying that one of my goals...
Louis Henkin Professor of Human and Constitutional Rights, Columbia Law School. From 2009-2011, the author served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed here are personal and do not purport to reflect the views of the U.S. government. The period since September 11, 2001 has seen significantly heightened interest in...
In Extraterritorial Application of Human Rights Treaties: Law, Principles, Policy, Marko Milanovic has written an illuminating and comprehensive analysis of the increasingly contested question of the geographic scope of human rights treaties. Of course, this is a dynamic area of law—as Marko notes, many of the cases he examines are of quite recent vintage—so undoubtedly he will be at work...
I am very grateful for the opportunity to discuss my book on EJIL: Talk! and Opinio Juris, as am I grateful to the commentators on both blogs for taking the time to read and discuss it. In this introductory post I’ll try to outline the book’s main arguments and themes and my approach generally in analysing a very complex topic. The...
