I want to thank the folks at OJ for having me over the past two weeks. You have all made me feel at home and I've enjoyed it very much. I've especially appreciated the opportunity to discuss legal issues stemming from upheaval in the African Great Lakes region. Some of these issues have been on my mind...
Until his arrest by the Rwandan military earlier this year, General Laurent Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi and former chairman of the Congolese Congrès National pour la Défense du Peuple (CNDP), had been considered one of the key destabilizing figures in eastern Congo. Back in 2004, Nkunda and his rebel troops took control of the South Kivu town of Bukavu,...
Brad Roth, an old friend, and well known to many OJ readers as law and political science professor at Wayne State University, delivers a heck of a punch with his new paper, set to appear in Santa Clara Journal of International Law (2009), but up in draft at SSRN, "Coming to Terms with Ruthlessness: Sovereign Equality, Global Pluralism, and the Limits...
It's the colossal human catastrophe that just won't go away. And closing our eyes and wishing it were so is not going to work. There are new reports of fresh fighting, and widespread internal displacement and sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to UNHCR, some 56,000 people have been forced to flee renewed armed conflict...
As part of his latest attack on Human Rights Watch, David Bernstein insists -- again -- that HRW "absolutely refuses to apologize or retract" when it is "wrong about Israel." He also claims that, "[t]hough challenged," I have "yet to come up with another, legitimate example of HRW officially responded to legitimate criticisms from pro-Israel sources the way it responded...
Um, somehow I don't think the analogy works: The nation – its economy and political body – has been strapped down, blindfolded and hosed. A new administration, empowered by control of both houses of Congress and the most liberal president in history, is immersing us all in a torrent of debt. While we gasp for breath and try to cry "Time...
The Economist reports this week (August 1, 2009, p 64), "Remittances to developing countries: what goes up," that remittance payments by immigrants, legal and illegal, from developed countries to developing countries has shrunk by a lot. Remittances held up during 2008 but they are a lagging indicator of economic distress, and in 2009 were shrinking radically: [T]he chances that remittances will...
Since 1876 the House of Lords has served both as the court of last resort and the upper house of Parliament. In response to concerns for separation of powers, the Constitutional Reform Act of 2005 put an end to the judicial role of the House of Lords effective today, July 31, 2009. Marko Milanovic has an interesting post on...
I want to give my sincere thanks to all the participants in the symposium on Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? Many terrific points, questions, and critiques were raised (made?) this week, and I certainly found it a fascinating discussion. My book is an attempt to synthesize and reframe a wide range of issues related to territoriality, and in so...
Ken is going to be so jealous that I blogged about this story first! Apparently, there is concern that a new robot capable of ingesting and extracting biomass from the environment will become some kind of robot zombie feasting on (yummy?) human flesh. The companies behind the robot, however, want us to know that nothing could be further from the...
Excellent news -- and a major blow to the AU's promise of impunity for Bashir, given the symbolic and practical importance of South Africa for the continent generally: SOUTH Africa will arrest Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir if he visits the country, despite an African Union decision to ignore a war crimes warrant against him, the foreign ministry said yesterday. Civil society...
My too-brief contribution to the Territoriality symposium is to send you over to Michael Innes's brief comment on cyberterritoriality. He comments there on Tim's remarks, rather than Kal's book - tangential to Kal's book, but cyberterritoriality is very important in its own domain. (Update: Apologies, Mike, for getting the attribution wrong (see Mike's comment), and I'm correcting it here.) Michael is founder...
