In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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30 Dec

Train wreck, fiasco, disaster, dumpster fire, bad joke, kangaroo court, show trial -- take your pick, the description applies. Eviatar's post at Just Security a while back is a must-read; here is but one particularly disturbing snippet: Recent pre-trial hearings have revealed, for example, that the Guantanamo courtroom was equipped with microphones able to eavesdrop on privileged attorney-client communications; that the CIA...

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30 Dec

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa More than 1000 people have died in fighting in South Sudan in the past month, where a political crisis is turning into a tribal conflict. Zimbabwe's ambassador to Australia has requested asylum there a few days before her term was due to end. Americas Edward Snowden has declared "mission accomplished" and also issued...

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27 Dec

John Sexton, the controversial President of NYU, has spoken out against the American Studies Association's much-debated resolution in favour of boycotting Israeli universities. Here is his statement, issued jointly with NYU's provost: We write on behalf of New York University to express our disappointment, disagreement, and opposition to the boycott advocated by your organization of Israeli academics and academic institutions. This boycott...

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26 Dec

Citizenship practice and policy is mostly below the news radar; change is slow; and the field tends not to be reported in any sort of integrated way. So here are the key threads from 2013 and how they might spin out in 2014. 1. Citizenship is not priceless.  A growing number of states are selling citizenship. Malta is the latest. EU...

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23 Dec

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Middle East British and U.S. spies targeted a senior EU official, German government buildings, and the office of an Israeli prime minister, according to the latest leaked documents from Edward Snowden published on Friday. Israeli officials said they were not surprised by allegations of spying and played down the...

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22 Dec

British artist Banksy knocks it out of the park again, with a rather unusual rendering of a Nativity scene: As ArtInfo notes, this is not Banksy's first comment on the Israel/Palestine conflict. He painted nine amazing murals directly on the wall in 2005, including a boy drawing a chalk ladder over the wall and a girl floating over the wall with...

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21 Dec

That's the punchline of a podcast Radiolab just released this week, provocatively titled "Sex, Ducks and The Founding Feud".  Along with John Bellinger, Joseph Ellis and Nick Rosenkranz, I was interviewed for the story by Jad Abumrad and Kelsey Padgett.  It was a fun experience overall trying to explain to a general audience the importance of the US treaty power and how...

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21 Dec

This week Kevin briefly turned the blog into The Onion Juris with his satirical ICTY press release, after the Court, in Kevin's opinion, nailed the final nail in the coffin of its legitimacy. In a guest post, Eugene Kontorovich framed the question as a design choice in terms of who should bear the risk when a judge becomes unavailable before a trial has...

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19 Dec

Oklahoma City police are obviously upset that the UK has pulled ahead of the US in the competition to have the most absurd definition of terrorism. Hence this: On Friday, Oklahoma City police charged a pair of environmental activists with staging a "terrorism hoax" after they unfurled a pair of banners covered in glitter—a substance local cops considered evidence of a faux biochemical assault. Stefan...

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18 Dec

[Eugene Kontorovich is a Professor of Law at Northwestern University School of Law.] What should an international court do when the judges hearing a case are not around to decide it, as has happened on the ICTY in the Seselj case that Kevin has written about? The death or serious illness of an international judge during the pendency of a case is an entirely foreseeable matter. International...

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