The White House’s recent statement that it would begin supplying Syrian rebels with arms demonstrates how military assistance and intervention remain a choice of states rather than an obligation. Recent events confirm the arguments I make in a recent article The Choice to Protect: Rethinking Responsibility for Humanitarian Intervention. I am pleased to be guest blogging about this topic over...
Opinio Juris is pleased to welcome Professor Neomi Rao of George Mason University School of Law as guest-blogger for the next week. With the Syria crisis re-emerging as a possible flashpoint for military intervention, we thought it would be interesting for Professor Rao to discuss her recent work on the status and impact of the "Responsibility to Protect" principle that is...
The U.S. Government has finally confirmed what other nations, and certain UN investigators, have been saying for weeks: the Syrian government has been using chemical weapons against the rebel opposition in its ongoing civil war and that at least 100 individuals have been killed. And the White House also repeats a version of the "red line" language President Obama first...
The deadline for submitting your proposal has arrived! A reminder that June 14 is the last day you can submit a proposal for the Mid-Year Research forum to be held in NYC from November 1-3 this year. This conference features works-in-progress by society members - it is a terrific way to workshop your research projects. Here is the call for...
The tendency in the United States is to think about cyberthreats exclusively in terms of US interests (a tendency I've certainly followed on more than one occasion). Hence, the extended attention to questions of whether and how Congress should regulate cybersecurity. But, of course, cyberspace -- and cyberthreats -- are global. Every nation is now faced with developing a strategy...
In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Edward Snowden has revealed that the US has engaged in hacking activities against Hong Kong and China. In a report released yesterday to mark World Day Against Child Labor, the ILO estimated that around 10 million children worldwide are working in domestic labour. Turkey's crackdown in Taksim Square may not be without consequences...
At the outset, I am concerned by the structure of Kevin’s reasoning. Kevin (and apparently the ICTY judges he supports) seem to reason inductively, taking the putative innocence of weapons transfers by American and British governments to Syrian rebels as a point of departure. Although I’m sure Kevin just means to use a well-known contemporary example to illustrate his concerns, the optics are bad for him and the ICTY—by backing into this issue with the a priori assumption that American and British practices are necessarily beyond reproach, the reasoning risks substantiating views (so common now among African leaders and TWAIL scholars) that the discipline is structurally biased. To preserve the impartiality and therefore legitimacy of international criminal law, surely we should start with a morally defensible concept of complicity, then let responsibility attach where it may. Otherwise, the new “specifically directed” test speaks to darker problems that infect the entire system.
The NSA may be collecting data on Americans in the United States. What about Americans abroad? "Foreign intelligence" is a term threaded through the surveillance debate, with a general understanding that collecting that kind of information is okay. The term is defined in a territorial sense, in the sense of intelligence originating outside of the United States. Under the FISA Amendments...
The Pre-Trial Chamber I has rejected Laurent Gbagbo's challenge to the admissibility of the case against him, due to insufficient evidence that he is being actively prosecuted in Côte d'Ivoire. EU officials have sent a "please explain" to the US over the private information of European citizens collected under the PRISM program. Meanwhile, Google, Facebook and Microsoft have asked the US government...
Network from Michael Rigley on Vimeo. Via Boing Boing a very good short animation discussing data mining. This isn't focused on the NSA program that is currently the source of discussion and dispute but the broader issue of how both companies and governments are able to retain, purchase, and analyze massive amounts of data. For a deeper dive into data mining, I highly recommend...
I’ve spent the last days at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands attending a terrific conference on privileges and immunities of IOs. (In addition to Leiden’s history of excellence in international law, there were some wonderful revelations at the conference about the university’s history -- like the fact that Albert Einstein taught there). The discussions shed light on the complex...
The United States may decide early this week to provide armed assistance to Syrian rebels. Israel's PM Netanyahu has made clear that Israel refuses to get involved in this discussion. Turkish riot police have moved into Taksim Square to remove anti-government protesters. A Kenyan court has imposed prison sentences of five years on nine Somali nationals accused of piracy in the Gulf...
