In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Trade & Economic Law

19 Dec

[caption id="attachment_10843" align="alignnone" width="300" caption=""][/caption](Cross posted on Smith School of Enterprise and Environment) Copenhagen, December 19 – The Copenhagen conference limped to a finish mid-day Saturday after “working” throughout the night. These all night sessions on the closing day are becoming a COP ritual, with people spending most of their time waiting around the conference room while small huddles...

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17 Dec

The one thing that has become abundantly clear this week at Copenhagen is that there is very distinct lack of trust between developed and developing countries. This came to a head on Monday with the walkout of some of the G77 countries as they believed that developed countries were attempting to scrap the Kyoto Protocol. A critical element in building trust...

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17 Dec

[Professor Dan Bodansky is continuing his dispatches from the climate change talks.  This post is cross-posted at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment at Oxford.] Copenhagen, December 17 – With the hours counting down to the end of the Copenhagen conference, real substantive negotiations have yet to begin. Instead, the focus has been almost exclusively on procedure. All...

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16 Dec

The Copenhagen process is multilateral, focused on reaching global agreements. But to get to a strong and truly effective global climate regime, bold bilateral initiatives may be needed. The conditions are propitious for a deal between China and the US, the world’s largest and second largest emitters, but that will call for imaginative and committed leadership on both sides as...

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15 Dec

Monday, December 14 – The climate negotiations ground to a halt for much of today, as negotiators debated the organization of work for the second and final week of the meeting. The ostensible cause of the breakdown was concern among (some?) developing countries that the Kyoto Protocol (KP) track in the negotiations is moving more slowly, and getting less...

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14 Dec

For too many years American climate change debates were political contests in which scientific evidence took a back seat to political posturing, obfuscation, and ultimately, inaction. Today, the science demonstrating that our world is warming and that humans are a primary cause of this warming is unambiguous. Though there remain a few public voices willing to deny the...

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14 Dec

Here in Copenhagen, agreeing on some principles of climate finance, at least in very basic form, is at last becoming a priority. Last week, after announcing EU money for a climate change fast start fund, German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged that developing countries would only enter into a climate agreement if sufficient money was committed by developed countries: “This is...

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10 Dec

[As noted earlier, Professor Dan Bodansky is continuing his dispatches on the climate change talks.  He is in Copenhagen this week and next, and sends us this initial letter.  OJ will be providing additional commentary on the climate change talks -- from the conference, and from other academic commentators -- over the next week. Dan's letter is being cross-posted at...

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08 Dec

Der Spiegel has an excellent story on the possibility that a Eurozone country might default on its sovereign debt, with economic, political, and legal consequences that could be anything from serious to dire.  The country is Greece: Greece has already accumulated a mountain of debt that will be difficult if not impossible to pay off. The government has borrowed more than...

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08 Dec

The Guardian has a leaked copy of what it's calling "the Danish text" (see it here).  Apparently, this draft was developed by the Danes along with other developed countries including the United States and the United Kingdom in the hope that it might become the basis for whatever instrument emerges from Copenhagen.  As widely expected, the instrument is framed as a "political agreement"...

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30 Nov

The just-released CFR web publication "Public Opinion on Global Issues" offers one-stop shopping for those looking for public opinion surveys across a range of transnational policy issues.  The overview explains how CFR and the Univ. of Maryland consolidated all publicly available opinion polls and provides a few significant findings: The international community confronts a daunting array of transnational threats and challenges...

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