Children and armed conflict or “CAAC” (as the unharmonious acronym goes), has become a controversial area of activity for the UN Security Council. Although the Security Council has adopted a series of important resolutions on the topic since 2005, its most recent foray into the fray led to four abstentions to Resolution 2068. Azerbaijan, China, Pakistan and Russia declined to support...
Kevin and I have still never met in person, but we've already had our first twitter encounter last week on the legality of a U.S. military response to the attacks that killed the U.S. Ambassador in Libya (as well as three other Americans). Although the news reports on the attacks are not exactly clear, some have suggested that there is...
With all the 50th anniversary retrospectives, seems like a good time to revisit Abram Chayes' foreign relations law classic, The Cuban Missile Crisis: International Crises and the Role of Law. Chayes was the State Department Legal Adviser in October 1962, on leave from Harvard Law School; though Chayes was a participant in deliberations around the crisis, the book wears its...
I am delighted to announce that Oxford University Press has just published a paperback edition of my book, The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. The paperback is priced at a very reasonable £25 -- £45 cheaper than the hardback. Here again is the description: This book provides the first comprehensive legal analysis of the twelve war...
Violence erupted in Beirut after the funeral of the slain intelligence chief, raising fears that Lebanon will be unable to escape the tensions in Syria. Foreign Policy has more here. In Syria itself, violence continues, and Special Envoy Brahimi has once again called for a ceasefire over the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha starting this Thursday. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has told the special envoy...
I want to call readers' attention to an excellent new article by James Stewart (UBC; currently a Global Hauser Fellow at NYU) that is forthcoming in the Journal of International Criminal Justice. Here is the abstract of the article, entitled "Overdetermined Atrocities": An event is overdetermined if there are multiple sufficient causes for its occurrence. A firing squad is a classic...
This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted a book discussion on Informal International Lawmaking, a new volume edited by Joost Pauwelyn, Ramses Wessel and Jan Wouters, hot of the presses from OUP. In a post on the conceptual approaches adopted by the authors, Joost Pauwelyn explained what they mean by "informal" international lawmaking and what the book hopes to add to the debate on non-traditional forms...
Earlier this week, Harold Koh gave a speech. And it wasn't about conflicts, drones, or cyberwar, topics that have dominated the attention of international lawyers in recent years. Rather, Koh's speech was a meditation on the processes of international law-making that confront the State Department on a daily basis. It was, simply put, a survey of the current international legal landscape...
We are happy to announce that this Monday Professor Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School will join Opinio Juris as our newest member. Kristen’s articles range across a variety of topics in international law and, in particular, she has become a respected scholar regarding questions of the responsibility of international organizations and of states. She also writes...
Argentina, Australia, Luxembourg, Rwanda and South Korea have been elected for a two year term as UN Security Council members. They will replace Colombia, Germany, India, Portugal and South Africa from 1 January 2013. North Korea has threatened with violence if activists in South Korea release balloons with propaganda messages into North Korea next week. One day after a drone strike killed eight...
As Peter's post yesterday noted, there's a growing push to fundamentally re-align cyberspace governance via amendments to the ITU Regulations, which are set to be negotiated in December in Dubai. I'm not sure that the ITU is up to the task. But I do agree that the time is ripe for States and other stakeholders to agree on first principles...
In a development that sounds (at least obliquely) in informal lawmaking, this from the very informative blog at The Hill: Representatives from Google, Cisco, Facebook, Microsoft and AT&T will join Obama administration officials at a December conference in Dubai to negotiate the terms of an international telecommunications treaty. The industry members are part of the 95-person delegation representing the United States as it...
