Chances of an airstrike on Iran by March 2007? About 35%, almost the same chances that the Seattle Seahawks will win the Super Bowl today. Compare the betting line here and here....
Iran's decision to resume uraniam enrichment is precisely what it threatened before the IAEA Board meeting last week. In a letter dated February 2, 2006, Iran firmly requested that the case not be submitted to the Security Council. It included the threat that "I am afraid to warn that if the interlocutors of Iran want to put pressure on the...
Last week the D.C. District Court ruled that the claims against Sudan for materially supporting the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya may go forward. In Owens v. Sudan, the court ruled that there were sufficient allegations that Sudan materially supported the terrorist attacks to overcome a motion to dismiss. The concise holding is that if you finance terrorism, in...
The flap over cartoons continues to rock the Muslim world. The BBC has great coverage with a dozen articles addressing the topic. The issue is particularly sensitive and reflects deep cultural and religious differences between Western values of freedom of expression and Islamic values of the holiness of the Prophet Muhammad. Obviously Western media should be more sensitive to depictions...
Kofi Annan will step down as UN Secretary General this December. The campaign season for his replacement is heating up. By tradition of regional rotation, it's Asia's "turn" to supply the Secretary General (though the region is defined rather broadly to include the Middle East). Richard Holbrooke's op-ed in today's Washington Post reviews the potential candidates:· Surakiart Sathirathai, Thailand's deputy...
I couldn't resist this news item about today's events at the Security Council. Apparently, some Perm Reps believe in the German university "Akademische Viertel" (academic quarter) rule of promptness: so long as you arrive within fifteen minutes of a scheduled meeting, you are on time. US Ambassador John Bolton, perhaps taking the lead from his President who is known for...
I will speaking tomorrow at the Barnes Symposium held at the University of South Carolina Law School. The symposium as a whole will discuss the legitimacy of western views of human rights and will have participants from all over the world, both in person and via video conference (a list of speakers is found here). I myself will...
The U.S. Congress last night brought the U.S. in compliance with two WTO decisions. First, it essentially scrapped the U.S. program of subsidies for cotton farmers. The proximate cause of this decision was Brazil's victory last year in the WTO finding that such subsidies violated WTO obligations. The other proximate cause, of course, is the renewed emphasis in Congress...
My vote for the most important international law case in January is the Ninth Circuit's decision in United States v. Clark. The case represents a rare and important instance of a court attempting to grapple with the scope of the Foreign Commerce Clause.Michael Clark was convicted of traveling to Cambodia to engage in commercial sex with a minor in violation...
My friends at UN Watch have relaunched a completely revamped and upgraded website. It is a great resource for information about NGO activities at the UN human rights organs and UN democratic reform efforts more generally. UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer has even started a blog section. (Click here for his comments on MLK JR day.)If you want to...
If the FBI had a file on you, what would you do? Prominent international criminal law professor Cherif Bassiouni faced precisely such a dilemma. So what did Bassiouni do? Bassiouni, who teaches at Depaul School of Law and is well known in ICC circles, requested a copy of the files, found errors in the 50-page report, and demanded that they...
The key foreign relations component of President Bush's State of the Union speech last night was the global march of democracy. It is now beyond dispute that this issue is the key to his foreign relations agenda for the second term. As he put it, "Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer, and so we will...
