Kevin has done, and is doing, a very nice job of critiquing the legality of the Obama Administration's targeted killing policy. On the critical side, it is also worth noting the views of Mary Ellen O'Connell, Professor at Notre Dame, who has become a leading public critic of the legality of this policy. Her basic point is that international law...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
We knew this was coming, but still it is a big deal: MADRID — The Spanish judge who became an international hero by going after Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden was indicted Wednesday for having dared to investigate what is arguably Spain's own biggest unresolved case: atrocities committed during and after its ruinous Civil War. Baltasar Garzon was charged with knowingly...
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...
The NYT reports that the Obama Administration has authorized the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, The article notes the international law justification for his killing: he is an avowed member of Al Qaeda actively engaged in hostilities against the U.S. Under either the law of armed conflict or the general law of self-defense,...
That's what Rob Crilly claims in an editorial today in the Telegraph: Before he was indicted, Bashir told regional leaders and his confidantes that he was ready to step down: after 20 years in office, he was ready for a holiday, and retirement to a smart new villa in the north of Khartoum. Now, fearing arrest by a...
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,...
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...
