In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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05 Mar

A recent Lawfare post by Jack Goldsmith noted the appearance of NYU professor Ryan Goodman's controversial new EJIL article, "The Power to Kill or Capture Enemy Combatants." It was followed by an even more provocative summary of it in Slate.  Both pieces have launched a very interesting debate between Goodman, on the one side, and a group of well-known LOAC scholars...

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05 Mar

The head of the IAEA has urged Iran to allow international inspectors access to a military site near Tehran to explore whether nuclear tests have been carried out there. The UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Counterterrorism, Ben Emmerson, has urged the US to publish a Bush-era detention and rendition program report. On the island of Borneo, Malaysian troops attacked an armed Filipino group with...

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04 Mar

[Christopher N.J. Roberts is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School.] This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 54(1) symposium. Other posts from this series can be found in the related posts below. Convergence The most important studies stimulate a host of unlikely conversations. In this regard, “Getting to Rights,” a path-breaking article that examines...

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04 Mar

This post is part of the Harvard International Law Journal Volume 54(1) symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below. This symposium features a series of four responses to articles published in the Harvard International Law Journal's volume 54(1). Over the next few days we will be presenting the responses, as well as commentary from...

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04 Mar

Sudan's government has violated UN sanctions on the Darfur region by carrying out airstrikes in the country's west. Israel has plans to launch "Palestinian-only" buses to transport people from the West Bank to Israel, in a move officials claim is designed to reduce traffic congestion but many concerned with civil rights see this as a move toward further segregation. Al-Qaeda has issued an English-language magazine (downloadable) offering advice...

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03 Mar

[Sigall Horovitz is a PhD candidate, teaching fellow and Transitional Justice Project Manager at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a member of ALMA – the Association for the Promotion of IHL. A longer version of this op-ed appears on the website of the Israeli Democracy Institute (in Hebrew).] The Palestinians have threatened to complain to the International Criminal Court (ICC) about Israel’s settlement activities...

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03 Mar

The win in question concerns the privileged documents the Libyan government seized from Melinda Taylor and her OPCD colleagues while they were meeting with Saif Gaddafi in Libya. In late January, the OPCD asked the Pre-Trial Chamber to order Libya to return the documents and destroy any copies it had made of them. Here is what it argued, as summarized...

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02 Mar

This week on Opinio Juris, it was too early for Talk Like a Pirate Day, but we certainly talked a lot about pirates. The reason of course was the Ninth Circuit's decision to agree with Japanese whalers that the Sea Shepherd's activities amount to piracy. Julian wasn't fully confident that "private ends" are broader than financial enrichment, and Kevin strongly...

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01 Mar

My previous posts (see here for the most recent) have explained why Judge Kozinski's opinion in the Sea Shepherd case wrongly considers a political end to be a private end. In this post I want to highlight what is ironic -- though not technically incorrect -- about Judge Kozinski's conclusion that Sea Shepherd committed an act of piracy on "the...

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01 Mar

As part of my new research interest in China and its relationship with the international legal system, I opened a Sina Weibo account a couple of weeks ago. And it has been quite an adventure. Weibo is China's version of Twitter and Facebook.  Since both Twitter and Facebook are blocked within China, Weibo is the main social media platform for users...

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