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Weekend Roundup: May 17 – 23, 2014

This week on Opinio Juris, Duncan shared his initial reactions on the DOJ charges against Chinese military officials over cyberespionage targeting US industries and Chimène Keitner examined the indictments from the perspective of foreign official immunity. Julian looked into the aftermath of China's decision to move an oil rig to a disputed area of the South China Sea. He argued that Taiwanese investors might be better off invoking the...

Implications of Security Council Veto on ICC Referral of Syrian Situation

Before yesterday’s vote on referring the situation in Syria to the ICC, Louise Arbour, outgoing President of the International Crisis Group and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, was quoted in the New York Times as saying “The only question in my mind is, will it belong to the cemetery of good intentions or the museum of political scoring?...

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Takes on the AUMF

As several of my friends at Just Security and Lawfare have noted, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday held an, um, interesting hearing on whether the primary domestic law authorizing the use of force against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated forces needs to be repealed or revised. Witnesses’ written statements and (more interesting) video of the hearing is here. The hearings featured current DOD General Counsel Stephen Preston, Principal Deputy Legal Adviser at the State Department Mary McLeod, followed by former (Obama) State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh and former (Bush) Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The Administration witnesses took a pounding. Some of the harsh questioning was, as ever, partisan bombast seeking to score pre-election points. Some of it was the members’ impatience with the complexity of the (overlapping) domestic and international law in the area. But some of it was the members’ understandable difficulty in trying to follow the witnesses’ at times needlessly confusing responses, viz. “Q: Give me a sense of what you get from the AUMF that you don’t have under existing statutory or constitutional law? A: “…I think it would be fair to say that with or without an AUMF, to the extent that it grants authority for the use of military force against Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, in which we are in armed conflict, to the extent that those groups continue to pose a threat of imminent attack against this country, the President does have constitutional authority to act….” And some of it was genuine frustration, viz. “Q: If a bill was introduced today to repeal the [2001] AUMF, would the Administration’s position be support, oppose, or I don’t know? A: As of today, Senator, I think the answer is, we don’t know.” So does the Administration really think the President's authority under Article II of the Constitution gives it all the power it needs, even without the AUMF? If one is concerned about this kind of broad inherent executive authority, and if all agree the Al Qaeda of 9/11 is diminished and the nature of the threat of terrorism is evolving, doesn’t that necessarily mean we need new statutory authority to define or constrain the President’s ability to go after these evolving threats? My view: no and no. Here’s why.

A Post-Snowden world? Criminalizing Chinese cyberespionage

Three quick (and thus tentative) thoughts on the BIG news out of the Justice Department a few minutes ago, announcing criminal charges against five officers of the Chinese People's Liberation Army for hacking various U.S. industries, including Westinghouse and US Steel.  The Justice Department offered fairly detailed descriptions of how the hackers obtained information that had direct economic consequences for US companies, whether in...

Weekly News Wrap: Monday, May 19, 2014

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa West African leaders agreed to work together to wage "total war" on Boko Haram saying the Nigerian Islamist group had become a regional al Qaeda that threatened all of them. Mali sent in troops to retake Kidal from Tuareg separatists, with the government claiming it is "at war"...

Weekend Roundup: May 10-16, 2014

This week on Opinio Juris, the NYU Journal of International Law and Politics brought you a symposium on Professor Jedidiah J. Kroncke’s article Property Rights, Labor Rights and Democratization: Lessons From China and Experimental Authoritarians. In their comments, Cynthia Estlund looked at parallels with the US, Eva Pils pointed to a discrepancy in transnational civil society's concern for labour and evictee rights in China, and John...

Circling Back to that Existence of Armed Conflict Discussion

Last week saw a set of posts, across the law-and-security blogs, about whether an armed conflict existed at the time current commission defendant Abd Al Rahim Hussayn Muhammad Al Nashiri was allegedly involved in planning the October 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. See, e.g., Frakt, Vladeck, Heller, and Margulies. While I’ve written about this at length elsewhere, after reading the posts, I find myself disagreeing (at least in part) with pretty much all of my friends on the question of who can/must decide the answer to the existence-of-armed-conflict question. Here’s my thinking.

Guest Post: Strong Words, Weak Arguments – A Response to the Open Letter to the UN on Humanitarian Access to Syria (Part 2)

[Naz Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Project at Harvard Law School. This post is written in her personal capacity and does not represent the views of the CHE Project]  Part 1 can be found here. Humanitarian Concerns Perhaps as significant as the legal errors in the letter, the authors seem to take no account of the security implications of their recommendation....

Guest Post: Strong Words, Weak Arguments – A Response to the Open Letter to the UN on Humanitarian Access to Syria (Part 1)

[Naz Modirzadeh is a Senior Fellow at Counterterrorism and Humanitarian Engagement Project at Harvard Law School. This post is written in her personal capacity and does not represent the views of the CHE Project]  There is no shortage of profound questions arising out of the armed conflict in Syria. Yet whether the reported United Nations legal analysis concluding that the UN needs the consent of the Syrian authorities before it can undertake humanitarian relief actions on Syrian territory is not one of them. As international law questions go, this one is relatively straightforward: Absent a sufficient Security Council decision authorizing intervention—a decision which has not been forthcoming, at least not yet—UN system bodies, funds, programmes, and specialized agencies need to obtain the consent of the Syria authorities before undertaking relief actions on Syrian territory. You would be forgiven for being confused about whether there is a contested legal issue at stake if you had read the open letter sent on April 28th from 35 eminent legal experts (repeatedly referred to as “top international lawyers” in the press and in an increasingly loud Twitter campaign) to the UN Secretary General, Under Secretary General Valerie Amos, and the heads of the five UN humanitarian agencies. US Senator Tim Kaine (who sponsored the Syrian Humanitarian Resolution of 2014) quickly capitalized on the letter and the caliber of its signatories, sending a letter to Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon stating that “continued inaction will only undermine the legitimacy and reputation of the UN.” The Senator noted that while he supports a Chapter VII decision, he believes that “the UN already has the authority to act.” He states,

“Based on the opinion of prominent international lawyers, the UN currently has the mandate and legal authority to organize a large coalition of international NGOs poised to deliver humanitarian aid to all areas of Syria. Anything short implies complicity with the Syrian government’s continued violations of the basic principles of international law, and is shameful.”

Strong words—and ones that raise the question of whether the prominent international lawyers who signed the letter anticipated being implicated in the suggestion that the UN’s failure to essentially run the Syrian border against the government’s explicit denial of consent suggests “complicity with the Syrian government’s continued violations.” There are many actors with blood on their hands in the generational tragedy unfolding in Syria. In my view, the women and men of the UN’s humanitarian agencies are not on that list. In this post, I would like to provide a close initial read of the letter (whose arguments have been quickly amplified by an advocacy and media campaigns). My sense is that this is a political argument dressed up in the language of IHL.