Another day, another drone strike? Pakistani officials are reporting a second drone strike in as many days in North Waziristan, killing at least four. Ethnic violence has claimed almost twenty lives in South-East Kenya. A lavish ceremony has welcomed back the ARA Libertad to Argentina, after ITLOS ordered its release from seizure in Ghana. Syrian rebels have released 48 Iranian hostages in a...
Perhaps my favorite scene in the film Zero Dark Thirty comes relatively early on, when the two CIA interrogators around whom the early film revolves arrive at a U.S. military base in Afghanistan to interrogate their next detainees. The soldiers on the base have been keeping a cage of small monkeys (for unexplained reasons), and the scene opens with...
India has accused Pakistan of killing two of Indian soldiers in the disputed region of Kashmir, but Pakistan has denied any involvement and its media are playing down the incident. Hugo Chavez is too ill to be sworn in for his new term as President of Venezuela, raising a whole raft of constitutional questions. A military judge hearing the case against Bradley Manning in the Wikileaks affair...
There are a variety of ways one can measure the growing importance of international law scholarship. One metric that I have never seen discussed is simple: how often has the term “international law” been used in academic scholarship? Using Westlaw’s JLR library I calculated how often “international law” was referenced from 1987 to 2011. The results...
A U.S. drone strike killed eight people in northwestern Pakistan, the latest in a series of drone attacks that come as a retired U.S. general Stanley McChrystal warns their overuse may threaten American foreign policy goals. The trial of former Croatian Serb leader Goran Hadzic resumed in The Hague on Monday. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has asked that government-issued documents, such as...
[William S. Dodge is Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Research at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. From August 2011 to July 2012, he served as Counselor on International Law to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he worked on immunity matters. The views expressed here are his own and do not...
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad rejected peace talks with his enemies in a defiant speech that his opponents described as a renewed declaration of war. Foreign Affairs officials in the EU, UK and Turkey have responded sceptically and have called on Assad to step down. A U.S. drone strike killed at least 10 people suspected to be Taliban fighters in Pakistan's northern tribal areas, intelligence sources said, days...
Over the holidays here at Opinio Juris, the comments section of Kevin's post on the distinction between the legality and the morality of drone strikes was a hive of activity. The post itself was a follow-up to a first post in which Kevin applied a comparative criminal law lens to argue that under the broader understanding of intent prevailing outside...
The Senkaku / Diaoyu islands, a series of rocky, uninhabited outcrops, are being claimed by Japan, China, and Taiwan, amongst others, both for historical reasons, and because of their potential value in anchoring sovereignty over natural resources like oil. Some have predicted the dispute may be a military “flash point” in 2013. As Duncan noted last month, China made a partial submission...
A "senior Al-Qaeda figure" was killed in Yemen via a US drone strike yesterday, along with two others. For more on the SDNY's decision granting summary judgement to the US government about the FOIA suit we covered yesterday, Bloomberg covers it here, Politico has a story here, the ACLU has a press release here, the New York Times has a story here and an op-ed here, the Washington Post weighs...
According to the UN, the death toll of the Syrian conflict now exceeds 60,000. A US drone strike has killed Mullah Nazir, a Pakistani Taliban commander. The IMF has stated that the US "fiscal cliff" deal is not enough to bring the economy back on a sustainable path. Judge McMahon of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York has granted summary judgment to the government...
Thousands have protested in Hong Kong to demand the resignation of the China-backed chief executive and democratic leadership elections. Seven charity workers have been killed by gunmen in Pakistan when they visited a community centre that serves as a school and a clinic. According to South Korea's Finance Ministry, unification of the two Koreas could cost the South up to 7 percent of annual GDP for...
