It was a liberal speech, but also a nationalist one. Obama returned to the citizenship theme of his DNC acceptance speech: My oath is not so different from the pledge we all make to the flag that waves above and that fills our hearts with pride. They are the words of citizens, and they represent our greatest hope. You and I, as...
A UN report released yesterday entitled Treatment of Conflict Detainees in Afghan Custody: One Year On (report found here, press release found here) claims that Afghan authorities are still torturing prisoners, such as hanging them by their wrists and beating them with cables. A police office in Kabul has been attacked earlier today by Taliban forces, in a second attack on a government building...
Bond v. United States is one of those cases that promises both more and less than it seems. At first glance, it seems an important and fascinating case because it is the first time the U.S. Supreme Court will revisit any aspect of the famous 1920 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.'s decision in Missouri v. Holland. That decision, arguably the most famous...
Just a quick entry (it's late here in Tokyo) to note that the Supreme Court is going to hear the case of U.S. v. Bond, which, in effect, revisits the question of Missouri v. Holland and the scope of Congress's power to implement U.S. treaty obligations. Over at Volokh this past week, Nick Rosenkranz and Rick Pildes have been debating that constitutional...
The week on Opinio Juris started off on a lighter note with Ken's post on the Obama Administration's response to a petition to build the Death Star. And although the administration's answer encourages readers to "pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field", our comments raised the question of customary inter-stellar law. The pop cultural fun continued later with...
Saif al-Islam Gaddafi has appeared in a court for the first time since his capture last year, in the western town of Zintan, where he is facing charges related to a visit by an ICC lawyer last year. Jurist has more here. US and ECOWAS troops will support France’s mission in Mali. Armed Groups in International Law has an insightful post on...
I am delighted to announce that Thomas Graham, the U.S. Member of the World Trade Organization's Appellate Body, will be giving the Shapiro Lecture at Hofstra entitled "It Sure Looks Different from the Inside: Deciding International Disputes at the WTO." Graham has been an observer and a participant in the international trade law system since the 1970s as a USTR attorney,...
A team from the IAEA is in Tehran for nuclear talks with the Iranian regime. The ICC has launched an investigation into the situation in Mali, as Western troops continue to assist Mali's government in its fight against the al-Qaeda linked rebels. The ICC press release can be found here and Jurist has more here. An al-Qaeda affiliate group is holding a group of at least 20 foreign...
I can’t imagine that the DOD-DOJ-DOS-DNI-CIA lawyers assigned to this one are getting much sleep these days. According to the Washington Post: The Obama administration is considering significant military backing for France’s drive against al-Qaeda-linked militants in Mali…. The loosely affiliated web of Malian militants in the country’s north includes members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). But other...
The African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) are becoming active sanctioners in Africa. In the last few years, the AU and ECOWAS have applied sanctions in many African conflicts, including Mali, the Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, and Guinea-Bissau. This represents a lot of activity for the AU in particular, which is only 10...
Ordinarily I would leave events posting to our regular postings, but I fell behind and wanted to flag the upcoming Friday deadline for paper proposals for the "Law and Robotics Conference." It will take place on April 8-9, 2013, at Stanford Law School (the conference follows on the highly successful law and robotics conference that took place at University of Miami...
Afghan President Hamid Karzai announced that the United States would give Afghanistan its own fleet of aerial surveillance drones and would speed up the handover of detainees held by American forces. The European Court of Human Rights has found in Eweida and Others v. The United Kingdom (ECHR court document) that British Airways discriminated against a devoutly Christian employee by making her...
