In association with the International Commission of Jurists

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09 Apr

A federal district court in Texas has held that the Alien Tort Statute ("ATS") requires allegations of intent to violate international law. The mere knowledge that such violation was occurring, or would occur, is insufficient to support a claim under the ATS. The complaint in Abecassis v. Wyatt alleges that various corporations and individuals purchased oil from Iraq and made...

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09 Apr

I don't know a lot about CEDAW, the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, but I know that lots of groups on both sides think the treaty is really important. For instance, in this post, a critic of CEDAW quotes a proponent of CEDAW, Janet Benshoof,  for the view that: "[W]ere the United States (US) to ratify CEDAW, it would bring...

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09 Apr

I don't fully understand the nature of the legal charges against Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon. It sounds like, from this Economist article, that he is being accused of some version of "prosecutorial" and "judicial" misconduct for refusing to follow the terms of Spain's 1977 amnesty law preventing investigations into Franco-era crimes.  Garzon apparently held that there is a consensus that...

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08 Apr

The Obama administration has been savagely criticized for authorizing the CIA to use lethal force against Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen who is allegedly a member of al-Qaeda in Yemen.  Glenn Greewald, for example, has described the decision -- justifiably -- as "unbelievably Orwellian and tyrannical."  To date, however, critics have ignored what I think is perhaps the most important...

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08 Apr

Putting aside events in Kyrgyzstan (which certainly bear close watching), the day's big news for international lawyers was President Obama and Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev signing two related international agreements on the reduction of nuclear armaments. The State Department has posted the originals of this new START treaty here (see here for the longer, more detailed Protocol to that...

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07 Apr

As the Washington Post notes, the Obama administration has authorized the CIA to assassinate Aulaqi wherever he is found.  It is very unlikely that CIA agents qualify as lawful combatants -- they don't distinguish themselves from the civilian population, they don't carry their arms openly, etc.  So, let's assume that CIA agents manage to kill Aulaqi in Afghanistan.  I assume...

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07 Apr

The American Society of International Law recently awarded its annual certificates and prizes for scholarship in international law.  A number of the winners have either been involved in OJ symposia or are friends of the blog, so I want to acknowledge their achievements here: Certificate of Merit in a specialized area of international law: Mark Osiel, "The End of Reciprocity: Terror,...

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06 Apr

Walter Russell Mead has an illuminating post on the liberal internationalist tendencies of the Obama Administration.  Putting aside whether or not liberal internationalism is, as Mead puts it, "a strategic mistake that leads a lot of people inside the administration and well beyond it to make consistently bad decisions about American foreign policy.", I find his post fascinating for its classification of different approaches...

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06 Apr

"An ancient gold tablet, discovered during archaeological excavations in 1913 in the Ottoman Empire, disappeared from a Berlin museum in the immediate aftermath of World War II and reappeared almost sixty years later in the safe deposit box of a Holocaust survivor." So begins In re Flamenbaum, a case that reads like a Hollywood movie script. As reported here, "the...

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