Peter's posts on how Wikileaks actually makes the US and its diplomatic service look fairly good are spot on. The Foreign Service looks a lot more interesting now that I know I get to spy for the U.S., too! But as this article from Slate notes, Secretary Hillary Clinton made it official State Department policy ("The "National Human Intelligence Directive on...
The Wikileaks episode seems to be turning to the USG's advantage, at least domestically: it's provoking a lot of sympathy for the government as an entity. That's a rare sentiment these days. Leave aside angry calls for Assange's head (almost literally), people are actually feeling sorry for the USG. One way that's being expressed is to compare the government to private...
Harold Koh has warned Wikileaks of the dire consequences to the United States resulting from the publication of over 250,000 classified documents. But I doubt that Julian Assange and Wikileaks cares much about the damage done to our nation from this breach. What they presumably do care about is criminal prosecution. As Marc Thiessen at the Washington...
I suspect this will be a much bigger story than the previous Iraq and Afghanistan disclosures, mostly because there will be something here for everyone. I'm not sure that the State Department looks particularly bad, as Timothy Garten Ash explains. It shouldn't be a revelation to anyone that diplomats sometimes do something that looks like spying. This is much more...
I am grateful to Professor Van Schaack for her thoughtful and considered response. It strikes me as an entirely fair criticism that – albeit in a short commentary focusing on the standards governing the use of force by governments – I neglected to explore fully issues of combatant status in non-international armed conflicts and, more interestingly, belligerent nexus issues. The...
[Beth Van Schaack is an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and contributor to IntLawGrrls.] Professor Guilfoyle’s article makes a discrete and important contribution to his growing body of work on maritime law and the problem of piracy in the Gulf of Aden. The article cogently argues that international humanitarian law (‘IHL’) does not apply to most instances...
[Dr Douglas Guilfoyle is a Lecturer in Law at the Faculty of Laws, University College London.] It is sometimes suggested that because pirates were described by classical authors as hostes humani generis (enemies of humankind) or because the Security Council has authorised the use of ‘necessary means’ in repressing Somali piracy that the laws of armed conflict ('LOAC') must (or might)...
Dr Jean-Marc Coicaud is one of the more thoughtful and reflective UN officials, and his response shows why. Broadly speaking, I agree with all three of his comments The conceptual, political and operational relationship between law and legitimacy will be treated differently by political and legal theorists. For some, lawfulness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of legitimacy. For...
[Dr Jean-Marc Coicaud is the Director of the United Nations University Office at the United Nations in New York.] Professor Thakur highlights what he claims to be today the weak legitimacy of the United Nations. He does so not only by stressing the gap between the principles upon which the legitimacy of the UN is meant to be based and reality,...
[Ramesh Thakur is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.] The UN is the site where power should be moderated by lawful authority. Legitimacy connects authority to power. The greater the gap between power and justice in world affairs, the greater the international legitimacy deficit. The...
The stories of the earthquake and then the cholera coming out of Haiti continue to horrify and sadden, if it the global media wasn't already numb from Haiti stories. There is plenty of blame to go around: Bill Clinton, the Haitian government, and now we can add the United Nations to that list. Almost everyone now accepts that the United Nations...
I know Facebook does some strange things regarding friend suggestions, but I think this "tag your friends" request might take the cake. Behold how Facebook interpreted a photo I took of Mein Kampf in the Nuremberg Documentation Center: ...
