In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Trade & Economic Law

06 Dec

[Karen N Scott is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand] The ‘fragmentation’ of international law is used as a term of description and — more commonly — as a lament.  It emphasises the isolation and disconnect between regimes and institutions and is peculiarly apt as a description of international environmental law; a complex regulatory field comprising multiple regimes and...

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21 Nov

I haven't been following Australia's new law requiring plain packaging for tobacco products, but I am a bit surprised that Philip Morris has filed a notice of arbitration claiming the law violates Australia's bilateral investment treaty with Hong Kong.  Here is PM's argument: Australia is in breach of the BIT because plain packaging: Amounts to unlawful expropriation of PMA’s investments and valuable...

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13 Nov

As readers may know, Israel's Knesset is currently considering two laws designed to prevent foreign governments and international organizations from funding progressive Israel human-rights groups: one that drastically limits the amount of funding such groups could receive, and one that imposes a tax of nearly 50% on foreign funds received by human-rights groups that do not receive Israeli funding (i.e.,...

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10 Nov

There are many reasons to demand closing Guantanamo Bay and ending the military commissions, such as the government's tendency to invent armed conflicts in order to convict defendants of imaginary war crimes.  But even if you don't care about the integrity of international humanitarian law or the coherence of the American approach to that body of law, you should still...

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10 Nov

Here is a story that no one (here in the U.S. anyway) is paying attention to: Russia’s accession to the WTO cleared a major hurdle when the WTO Working Party on its accession approved, ad referendum on 10 November 2011, the package spelling out Russia’s terms of entry to the organization. The Working Party will now send its accession recommendation to...

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13 Oct

[Rishi Gulati lectures on Public International Law at the University of New South Wales in Australia.] At 9.24am on 12 October 2011, surrounded by chants of “democracy is dead”, a suite of 19 bills (the Clean Energy Bills or the Carbon Tax Bills) were passed in the Lower House of the Australian Parliament. It must be borne in mind that those 19 bills won’t...

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03 Oct

Trade treaties with South Korea, Columbia, and Panama are finally advancing, with President Obama set to send the three deals to Congress for approval this week, reports the WSJ this morning. The agreements had been tied up in acrimonious domestic politics for some five years, but it appears that bipartisan desire to improve the US export picture has moved things...

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23 Sep

Check out the following ad for the new Audi A6: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeuveTXuNho&feature=relmfu You know you're in trouble when a German company is using the decaying state of America's infrastructure to sell cars.  Then again, when you think about it, the ad is actually kind of a Republican utopia: austerity and expensive, environment-destroying luxury goods all in one.  Why fix the roads when your...

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22 Sep

Kate Sheppard has an interesting post at Mother Jones today discussing a series of WikiLeaks cables that detail Chevron's attempts to convince the Ecuadorian government to end the lawsuit against it.  Here are the two key cables she discusses: This from a March 2006 cable written by US officials in Quito: "In previous meetings, Chevron reps have suggested that the ...

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21 Sep

Following Talisman Energy, the Fourth Circuit has now held in Aziz v. Alcolac, another ATS case, that the mens rea of aiding and abetting under the "law of nations" is intent, not knowledge.  That's plainly wrong, as I have pointed out before, so there is no point dwelling on the new decision.  But this paragraph deserves specific mention, because it...

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21 Sep

Fantastic news: New York – A federal appeals court vacated an order Monday by a New York judge that barred an $18 billion judgment in Ecuador against Chevron Inc. for contaminating the Amazon. The three-judge panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had previously expressed skepticism that a New York judge could wield jurisdiction outside...

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