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General

02 Jun

[Jean Galbraith is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers School of Law - Camden] Thank you to Opinio Juris for letting me guest blog on Bond. The most notable thing about the Bond decision is a resounding silence.  As a matter of law, it should have been easy to find for the government.  The statutory text reads plainly in the government’s favor, and constitutional text, practice, and precedent easily support the conclusion that the federal government can override federalism interests in implementing constitutionally valid treaties.  Yet not a single justice sided with the United States.  This silence is particularly perplexing given that three justices at oral argument seemed sympathetic to the government. That is the major silence, but there are silences of reasoning in the opinions as well.  In what follows, I focus on two silences.  The first is the lack of consideration in the majority opinion of how treaty-implementing statutes might differ as a matter of statutory construction from ordinary statutes.  The second is the startling absence of constitutional history from the Framing onward in Justice Scalia’s concurrence.

The Majority Opinion

As Peter Spiro has noted, the majority ducks the constitutional question of whether the Treaty Power plus the Necessary and Proper Clause authorizes Congress to criminalize domestic poisonings like that of Ms. Bond.  Following a hint dropped by Justice Kennedy at oral argument, the Court does this by holding that there needs to be a “clear statement that Congress meant the statute to reach local criminal conduct.”  It isn’t enough for Congress to use broad language that seems to cover the act at issue; instead, Congress apparently has to do something more to signal specific intent to reach “local” conduct.  Congress didn’t do so here, so Ms. Bond wins. I won’t deconstruct the merits of this approach, although I think Justice Scalia does a good job in his concurrence of showing why it is problematic.  But I do want to mention that it leads to an interesting divergence between the interpretation of a treaty and the interpretation of implementing legislation.  The Court spent very little time on the interpretation of the Chemical Weapons Convention itself, merely noting its “doubts” that the Convention was meant to reach ordinary domestic poisonings.  If it had wanted to, the Court could doubtless have done more to interpret the Convention this way (e.g., by explicit discussion of “object and purpose” or perhaps by drawing on rule-of-lenity-related principles in international and comparative law).  But instead the Court accepted a wedge between the interpretation of a treaty and of its implementing legislation.  Federalism principles do not matter to treaty interpretation (given that these principles are country-specific) but do matter to the interpretation of implementing legislation.  If this canon of construction is about Congressional intent, then it strikes me as odd, because there is a countervailing consideration not mentioned by the Court. This is that when Congress uses language that closely tracks a treaty’s language in implementing the treaty, Congress presumably does so because it wants convergence rather than divergence with the treaty.

Justice Scalia’s Concurrence

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02 Jun

The decision is here. The Court found unanimously that the federal government overreached in prosecuting Carol Anne Bond under a federal statute implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention for what was otherwise a simple assault in a lovers' quarrel. The six-justice majority decided the case on non-constitutional, statutory grounds -- interpreting the statute (and the treaty) not to cover such conduct, but...

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02 Jun

So, Professor of Law, what are you going to do after you retire from your tenured post teaching and finish writing all the articles and books you want to write? Well, I guess I'll become President (of Malawi)! On Saturday, [Peter] Mutharika, now 74, a soft-spoken professor with a proper English-educated accent and who smoked a pipe while he taught in the 1970s,...

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02 Jun

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa China and the African Development Bank jointly unveiled a US$2 billion multilateral investment fund last week, marking a symbolic shift in their partnership.  A bombing in a bar in Nigeria's northeast has killed at least 14 people and injured another 14 in the second attack targeting football fans...

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01 Jun

The New York Times reports that:
The presidents of Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus formally signed an agreement on Thursday to create a limited economic union — an alliance hobbled by the absence of Ukraine but one long pursued by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to confirm his country as a global economic force. “Today we are creating a powerful, attractive center of economic development, a big regional market that unites more than 170 million people,” Mr. Putin said during the ceremonies. He underscored the significant energy resources, work force and cultural heritage of the combined nations.
This treaty, which was signed this past week but is not expected to come into force until January 2015, marks the next step in transforming the still-nascent Eurasian Customs Union (ECU) into the Eurasian Union (EEU). Russian pressure for Ukraine to turn away from association with the European Union and towards Moscow-led Eurasian integration was one of the roots of the current crisis. As the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with China and the Central Asian states is Russia's answer to U.S. military alliances, Eurasian economic integration is meant to be Russia's response to EU and U.S. economic power.  According to a chronology in a report by the Centre for European Policy Studies, the creation of the EEU was first suggested by the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, in 1994. There was not much movement until the negotiation and signing of a customs union treaty among Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in 2007. The basic requirements of the Eurasian Customs Union came into force in 2010, which were essentially trade policy coordination measures establishing a common external tariff among its members. However, the deepening Eurasian economic integration was given a boost by an op-ed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in October 2011. In early 2012, the member states deepened ECU’s institutions by starting the operations of the Eurasian Economic Commission, a supranational entity that was contemplated in the 2007 treaty,  to manage the external trade regulations of the member states, including relations with the WTO. That also marked the establishment of  the "single economic space" (SES) among the member countries which, in the words of the Centre for European Policy Studies paper, "envision[ed] further regulatory convergence and harmonisation of national laws" in particular economic sectors. The treaty that was signed on May 29th is ostensibly to move from customs union towards a full economic union, with free movement of goods, capital, and people among the member states, but reality has so far proven to be less sweeping and heroic than the rhetoric that marked the occasion. The most obvious issue is that the EEU was originally envisioned to include not only Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, but also Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and especially Ukraine. Ukraine would have added  a populous country with  economic potential and an an economy that (unlike Russia and Kazakhstan) was not based on natural resource exploitation. But Russia’s intervention in Ukraine  backfired: not only did it fail to bring Ukraine into the EEU fold but, according to a Radio Free Europe report, it has weakened the EEU by having:
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29 May

New briefs have been filed in the Haiti Cholera case against the UN, now pending in the SDNY.    Plaintiffs filed a response to the US Government's Statement of Interest, in which the US defended the UN's absolute immunity.  The important treaty law argument the Plaintiffs advance in response is that: Both international law and U.S. law provide that a material...

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26 May

Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa Suspected Islamist Boko Haram gunmen rampaged through three villages in northern Nigeria, killing 28 people and burning houses to the ground in a pattern of violence that has become almost a daily occurrence, according to police and witnesses. A Rwandan peacekeeper was killed in Sudan's western Darfur region...

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24 May

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...

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23 May

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.
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