Pierre N. Leval, a well-respected judge who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, has published a full-scale no-holds-barred policy defense of the Alien Tort Statute in Foreign Affairs. The essay, which is adapted from his lecture to the New York City Bar Association, offers the standard argument in favor of the...
Internal debate inside the Administration must be heating up, because someone in D.C. is in a leaky mood. McClatchy yesterday released a story on U.S. targeting operations billed as the “first independent evaluation of internal U.S. intelligence accounting” of such operations. The report is based substantially on classified reports covering most (not all) of the drone strikes carried out by the...
Human Rights Watch has published a new report entitled Death from the Skies alleging that Syrian forces have killed over 4,300 civilians by targeting places like bakeries and hospitals, and calls these air raids war crimes. Concerns about Syria and North Korea top the agenda of the G8 summit taking place this week in London. The EU has informed North Korea that...
The International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea has received a request for an advisory opinion from the Sub Regional Fisheries Commission located in Senegal. The Commission is a treaty based organization founded in 1985, which has seven member states (Senegal, Cape Verde, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, and Sierra Leone). Some background information on the Commission is available here. The...
South Korea has increased surveillance and asked China to rein in North Korea after Pyongyang moved a long-range missile in preparation for a possible launch. North Korea has warned foreigners to evacuate South Korea and said the area is headed for "thermo-nuclear war." Germany and France express growing concerns that Washington-backed EU sanctions on North Korea could negatively affect aid groups. Amnesty International...
Global leaders have paid their respects to Margaret Thatcher, the UK's first female prime minister, after her death yesterday. Thousands of North Korean workers have failed to show up for work at a shared industrial complex with South Korea after the North Korean leadership said it would withdraw workers and suspend work. With more on the North Korea situation, Foreign Policy asks...
There are reports stating that North Korea is preparing to carry out a fourth nuclear test based on intelligence coming out of South Korea. In the face of the rising tensions on the Korean peninsula, Foreign Policy offers advice about how to stop a nuclear war. Without directly naming North Korea, China has been critical of its recent actions to escalate tension on...
As regular readers of this blog might have noticed, I have become more and more interested China and its engagement with international law issues. Last year, I proposed to the ASIL Planning Committee that we put together a panel of leading U.S. China law scholars. But the ASIL organizers pushed back and put together a much more diverse group than...
This week on Opinio Juris, we brought you the latest round in the Goodman-Heller debate on capture v kill, in which Ryan Goodman responded to Kevin's comments on this blog a few weeks ago. Kevin started his week by pointing to turmoil in Sweden's prosecution of Julian Assange, following the resignation of the prosecutor and the decision by one of his accusers to...
Today marks 1000 days in the countdown towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon suggests four steps that the international community needs to take to achieve these goals. South Korea has reported its neighbor to the north has moved a missile to the east coast; the US has vowed to take "all necessary precautions" in response. World powers await...
Lawyers take note: science fiction is become less fiction and more science every day. In the last year we have witnessed the launch of the first commercially built capsule to resupply the International Space Station (ISS), the announcement of significant private ventures aimed at eventually mining asteroids (1, 2, see also this), the announcement of a plan to send two people on a...
