Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa South Sudan peace talks were scheduled to start on Sunday in Addis Ababa, but were delayed once again. Congolese troops staved off armed attacks in Kinshasa by armed followers of a religious leader who is critical of President Kabila over his decision to make peace with Tutsi rebels in...
If you've been away for the holidays, here is a summary of what we got up to at Opinio Juris over the break. Kevin posted Banksy's Christmas postcard, linked to his new essay on the legal recharacterization of facts at the ICC, and held another round in the Amnesty-Goodman-Heller debate on universal jurisdiction, and hoped the Muslim Brotherhood's legal team would explain the...
There’s never a boring year in international law and 2013 turned out to be particularly eventful: Syria, major cases in front of national and international courts, a possible nuclear deal with Iran, and turmoil in Eastern Europe, Egypt, and South Sudan, to name but a few reasons. This post is not an attempt to log all that we have written about...
I've been working hard this break teaching in Hofstra's winter program in Curacao. But I couldn't resist stepping away from the beach and posting on the India-US flap over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York. Dapo Akande at EJIL Talk! has two great posts on the consular and diplomatic immunity legal issues. I have nothing to add,...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa More than 1000 people have died in fighting in South Sudan in the past month, where a political crisis is turning into a tribal conflict. Zimbabwe's ambassador to Australia has requested asylum there a few days before her term was due to end. Americas Edward Snowden has declared "mission accomplished" and also issued...
Citizenship practice and policy is mostly below the news radar; change is slow; and the field tends not to be reported in any sort of integrated way. So here are the key threads from 2013 and how they might spin out in 2014. 1. Citizenship is not priceless. A growing number of states are selling citizenship. Malta is the latest. EU...
I have posted a new essay on SSRN entitled -- borrowing a phrase from a dissent written by Judge Van den Wyngaert -- "A Stick to Hit the Accused with": The Legal Recharacterization of Facts Under Regulation 55. The essay is forthcoming in a book on the ICC that Carsten Stahn is editing for OUP. Here is the abstract: Regulation 55 was...
Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Middle East British and U.S. spies targeted a senior EU official, German government buildings, and the office of an Israeli prime minister, according to the latest leaked documents from Edward Snowden published on Friday. Israeli officials said they were not surprised by allegations of spying and played down the...
That's the punchline of a podcast Radiolab just released this week, provocatively titled "Sex, Ducks and The Founding Feud". Along with John Bellinger, Joseph Ellis and Nick Rosenkranz, I was interviewed for the story by Jad Abumrad and Kelsey Padgett. It was a fun experience overall trying to explain to a general audience the importance of the US treaty power and how...
This week Kevin briefly turned the blog into The Onion Juris with his satirical ICTY press release, after the Court, in Kevin's opinion, nailed the final nail in the coffin of its legitimacy. In a guest post, Eugene Kontorovich framed the question as a design choice in terms of who should bear the risk when a judge becomes unavailable before a trial has...
First off, I would like to thank Paul, Daniel, and David for their very thoughtful comments. I’m glad to have the opportunity to respond to some of the key points that they made.
Paul provocatively suggested that perhaps we should care about results rather than democratic accountability per se. If a particular set of institutional arrangements actually improves human lives, maybe it’s of secondary importance whether those institutional arrangements are anti-democratic. Put in the terms of my article, the question wouldn’t be whether the World Bank suffers from a democratic deficit, but whether Congress’s participation in setting World Bank policy advances the Bank’s efforts to rid the world of poverty.
That’s a challenging question. Many government and Bank officials decry Congress’s meddling, arguing that it politicizes the Bank, that coping with congressionally-created financial crises detracts resources and staff time away from the Bank’s core mission, and that Congress’s interventions amplify the Bank’s tendency to cater to members who contribute funds at the expense of members who borrow them. Those are serious concerns. At the same time, the U.S. Congress was a forceful advocate of some innovations in the Bank’s operations that are widely praised, including the establishment of the World Bank Inspection Panel. The voting rules at the World Bank ensure that only those proposals that are able to gain the support of a range of member states are translated into World Bank policy. The obviously parochial legislated instructions that could impede the Bank’s efforts to support development are typically dead on arrival.
Both Daniel and David ask whether the dynamics the article describes in the World Bank context are likely to carry over to other international organizations, especially those that are more central to foreign affairs. Isn’t the conventional wisdom about the President’s dominance in foreign affairs, Daniel asks, really a story about high-salience foreign-affairs issues? Well, kind of. It’s certainly right that “foreign affairs” is often equated, explicitly or implicitly, with war and national security. But one of the points I hoped to emphasize is that this is an increasingly outdated and misleading perception of what “foreign affairs” encompasses. Today, nearly every federal regulatory regime has an international counterpart of some kind. To name just a few, there are international agreements that address wetlands protection, financial institutions, and food safety standards. If we want to understand the dynamics between the political branches in foreign affairs, we would be seriously remiss to ignore the vast realm of lower-salience issues.
The narrower question nonetheless stands:
In Congress Underestimated, Kristina Daugirdas offers a valuable new perspective on the role of the Congress in shaping the foreign relations of the United States with respect to international institutions. The article presents a fascinating case study of the assertive role of the Congress in influencing executive branch positions towards the World Bank and offers an interesting counter-example to the idea that the President reigns supreme in contemporary foreign relations. In these comments, I want to address two important questions raised by the article: First, is it right that Congress has been underestimated with respect to its influence over the World Bank? Second, is the World Bank case exceptional or does it reflect a more generalizable conclusion about the role of Congress in shaping US policy towards international institutions?
Daugirdas argues that leading accounts of Congress as a feeble participant in foreign affairs have underestimated its influence over US participation in the governance of the World Bank. She highlights the ways in which Congress has used its power of the purse to impose conditions on funding and give directives regarding the positions taken by the US Executive Director of the World Bank. Across Presidential administrations and in times of both unified and divided government, the executive branch has largely followed these congressional instructions with respect to the World Bank. Although the article recognizes some limits to this influence, it captures an important source of congressional leverage even as it potentially overstates its ultimate impact on the day-to-day operations of the Bank.
