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22 Jul

[Jonathan Hafetz is Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall Law School.  He has represented several Guantanamo detainees and has filed amicus briefs in previous legal challenges to military commissions.] On July 14, the en banc U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued its long-awaited (and deeply fractured) opinion in Al Bahlul v. United States (.pdf), addressing the scope of military commission jurisdiction over offenses—material support for terrorism, solicitation, and conspiracy—that are not crimes under international law.  In a nutshell, the D.C. Circuit vacated Bahlul’s conviction for material support and solicitation, but affirmed his conviction for conspiracy against an ex post facto challenge.  While the ruling takes material support and solicitation off the table for commission prosecutions (at least for prosecutions of current Guantanamo detainees), it does not resolve the viability of charging conspiracy as a stand-alone offense because the en banc holding is based on the application of plain error review to Bahlul’s case (due to its conclusion that Bahlul failed to preserve his ex post facto challenge below).  The decision thus leaves open the fate of conspiracy under de novo review.  By implication, it also leaves open the viability of the U.S. government’s domestic war crimes theory not only with respect to other commission cases charging conspiracy (including the ongoing prosecution of the 9/11 defendants), but also with respect to Bahlul’s other legal challenges to his conspiracy conviction, which the en banc court remanded to the original D.C. Circuit panel. This post will examine the multiple opinions in Bahlul addressing the U.S. government’s domestic war crimes theory, which posits that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (2006 MCA) retroactively authorizes, and that the Constitution allows, the prosecution by military commission of conduct that is not a crime under the international law of war.  (For excellent summaries of the Bahlul decision, see posts at Just Security by Steve Vladeck here and by Steve and Marty Lederman here).  The theory’s viability is central to the retroactivity arguments addressed by the en banc court as well as to the additional arguments under Article I and Article III that will be considered on remand.
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21 Jul

Professor Jens David Ohlin of Cornell Law School will be guest blogging with us over the next two weeks. Many readers may know Jens from his blogging at Lieber Code and from his many articles on international criminal law, the laws of war, cyberwar, and comparative criminal law, among other topics. Jens is also the author or editor of four books,...

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21 Jul

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Suspected Islamists raided the remote northeast Nigerian town of Damboa over the weekend, shooting dead more than 40 residents and burning down houses in a familiar pattern of killing that has forced tens of thousands to flee their homes this year. South Sudanese rebels and government soldiers clashed...

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19 Jul

This week on Opinio Juris, we kicked off the second edition of our Emerging Voices symposium with a post by Zachary Clopton on the horizontal and vertical dimensions of international law in U.S. Courts, followed by Abel Knottnerus' post on rule 134quater. Julian clarified last week's post on Taiwan and argued that "lawfare" will not deter China in the South China Sea. He...

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17 Jul

On Wednesday, a Dutch Court handed down a hotly anticipated decision on the Mothers of Srebrenica case, finding the Dutch state responsible for the deaths of 300 people who were sheltering with Dutchbat in July 1995, when the safe haven at Srebrenica fell.  The English translation is available here. This ruling means the relatives of those 300 Bosniaks will be entitled...

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17 Jul

That's the question asked by the blog of Oxford University Press. All of the short answers, provided by scholars ranging from Ruti Teitel to Bill Schabas, are worth a read. Here's mine: In my view, it is time to begin to question whether the International Criminal Court will ever play a major role in the fight against impunity. This is not...

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16 Jul

There are many dads who have played make-believe with their little girls, perhaps taking the part of kindly king to his daughter's princess.  Not many people have turned this game into an international legal incident concerning state formation.  But  at least one man has. According to the Washington Post:
Jeremiah Heaton was playing with his daughter in their Abingdon, Va., home last winter when she asked whether she could be a real princess. Heaton, a father of three who works in the mining industry, didn’t want to make any false promises to Emily, then 6, who was “big on being a princess.” But he still said yes. “As a parent you sometimes go down paths you never thought you would,” Heaton said. Within months, Heaton was journeying through the desolate southern stretches of Egypt and into an unclaimed 800-square-mile patch of arid desert. There, on June 16 — Emily’s seventh birthday — he planted a blue flag with four stars and a crown on a rocky hill. The area, a sandy expanse sitting along the Sudanese border, morphed from what locals call Bir Tawil into what Heaton and his family call the “Kingdom of North Sudan.” There, Heaton is the self-described king and Emily is his princess.
Wow. Heaton just upped the ante for all non-royal dads. The Washington Post also reports:
Heaton says his claim over Bir Tawil is legitimate. He argues that planting the flag — which his children designed — is exactly how several other countries, including what became the United States, were historically claimed. The key difference, Heaton said, is that those historical cases of imperialism were acts of war while his was an act of love. “I founded the nation in love for my daughter,” Heaton said.
That’s sweet. Really. But let’s turn to the international legal argument…
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14 Jul

Professor Yann-huei Song of the Academia Sinica here in Taipei has notified me of the recent passing of his friend and fellow Law of the Sea scholar William T. Burke of the University of Washington.  His Seattle Times obituary is here.  Professor Burke's academic publications included The Public Order of the Oceans (coauthored with Myres S. McDougal), published in 1962 and revised...

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14 Jul

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa In Nigeria, Boko Haram-style violence radiates southwards. Ebola continues to spread in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, with a combined 44 new cases and 21 deaths between July 6 and 8, the World Health Organisation has said. Asia North Korea has fired artillery shells into waters near its sea border with South Korea,...

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13 Jul

Harry J. Kazianis, the managing editor of The National Interest, has a smart post discussing the risk that the U.S. is taking if it tries to take more aggressive action to counter China in the South China Sea.  Essentially, he argues the U.S. has no effective strategy to counter China's "non-kinetic" strategy to subtly alter the status quo by using...

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