It's a little late in the Bush administration to be creating new foreign policy doctrines, but the NYT suggests that U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates did just that in his speech yesterday at the Carnegie Endowment. According to the NYT, this is the key sentence is the most expansive articulation yet of the nuclear deterrence policy: Today we also make clear...
Sure, some kind of important event will happen on November 4th involving the coronation of some guy named Barack, but international economic law geeks will have their eyes focused on a different date: November 15th. On that day, G-20 industrial leaders will gather at the National Building Museum in Washington D.C. to try to come up with a global response to the global financial...
While the Bush Administration may have reconciled itself to leaving office with the detention center at Guantanamo Bay still up and running, the U.S. federal courts continue pushing the detainees’ cases ahead toward resolution. After briefing by the parties on their competing definitions of “enemy combatant,” U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon yesterday announced a ruling: Enemy combatant’ shall mean an...
So asks Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation, in his interesting piece about the recent U.S. cross-border raids into Pakistan and Syria, with Iran looming (see this NYT article for background). Dreyfuss is very worried about this doctrine, and suggests that its acceptance could result in the "end of international law." I wouldn't go that far, but it is definitely a challenge to traditional norms...
With all the attention being paid to the pending genocide charges against Bashir, the media has largely ignored Moreno-Ocampo's recent announcement that he intends to seek an arrest warrant against rebel commanders in Darfur who are believed to be responsible for a vicious attack on AU peacekeepers in 2007: "In a couple of weeks I will present my third case against...
Article XX(a) of the GATT allows countries to violate WTO rules if doing so is “necessary to protect public morals.” The “public morals” exception is notoriously elusive, with only one WTO case—the US-Gambling Services case—clarifying the scope of the exception. So in a real sense we don’t really know when “public morals” can or cannot be invoked. ...
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Community Court of Justice has found that the West African state of Niger has violated its obligations to protect its citizens for slavery. Specifically, Niger failed to prevent Hadijatou Mani, who was sold into slavery at the age of 12 in 1996 for about £300 and regularly beaten and sexually abused. The Court...
In honor of Ken, I wanted to post a quick heads-up to this post by Tom James at Futurismic, which has the excellent title "I, For One, Welcome Our New Robodog Overlords." Money quote: According to Prof Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University: “What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack...
A couple of months ago, I blogged about the possibility that Blackwater would support the African Union's peacekeeping mission in Darfur. That hasn't happened yet, but the company seems to have found another line of work -- fighting pirates off the coast of Somalia: Blackwater Worldwide and other private security firms — some with a reputation for being quick on the...
Career diplomat Nicholas Burns has an essay in Newsweek on the whole "negotiate with adversaries" kerfuffle. (Yeah, I said "kerfuffle" because that's about all it deserves.) He begins: One of the sharpest and most telling differences on foreign policy between Barack Obama and John McCain is whether the United States should talk to difficult and disreputable leaders like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...
Sundays are a bit slow around OJ, so I thought I might offer (unless my confreres think it too far off topic) a series of indeterminate run, Sundays with Stendhal, featuring quotes from various works of the master. Stendhal was a diplomat in much of his career, a figure of a transborder European elite culture, and is also a figure...
