Prof. Martin Flaherty of Fordham was gracious enough to join me for a (short) podcast hosted by the Federalist Society on my book (co-authored with John Yoo) Taming Globalization. Marty takes John and I to task for our analysis of non-self-executing treaties and our lack of analysis of congressional-executive agreements. One of his most salient points is that our book argues...
UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay has argued that US drone strikes in Pakistan raises legal questions. China has promised "sincere and selfless" help to Afghanistan, committing to increasing aid, investment and security cooperation. In other news about China, it has also introduced new legislation to restrict internet use. Sudan and South Sudan have called off their peace talks with no deal in sight. Sudanese...
Open-ended Ad Hoc Working Group of the General Assembly on the Integrated and Coordinated Implementation of and Follow-up to the Major United Nations Conferences and Summits in the Economic and Social Fields(H/T Hayes Brown and his Water's Edge blog.) The email is somewhat sarcastic about the oft-remarked alphabet soup of UN agencies. But it points to another feature of the UN, often remarked upon by managerial experts at the UN itself, viz., that though there are many mechanisms for creating agencies and entities, it has far fewer mechanisms for eliminating them once created, whether because the original purpose has gone away, the functions performed by one actor duplicate those of another or have been absorbed, or because whether the function is useful or not, it should be eliminated to free up resources for other things. While this is generally true of national governments, particularly large ones, the highly diffuse nature of the UN and its institutions, along with many vested interests - some national and some internal to the UN itself - makes the problem more intractable. It is not an irrelevant question at the moment, however, given the increasing pressures on the UN budget (rather budgets, given that peacekeeping, in particular, is larger than the mandated UN budget) with developed world governments in difficult times. Budget negotiations over the general budget were strained this cycle, as even the Europeans, for obvious reasons, pressed to hold down budgets - but at the same time budgets have been creeping up. Budget negotiations over the peacekeeping budget were just wrapped up a few days ago, and likewise showed the strain of increased pressure to do more peacekeeping - particularly given that it is widely perceived as a useful and fairly effective activity, despite the problems with procurement corruption scandals, sexual abuses by peacekeeping forces, and other questions of operations management - at a time when developed countries are under fiscal pressures. One suggestion I make in my book, Living with the UN - one that is also frequently heard among UN efficiency experts inside the organization or hired to consult to it - is that the UN simply ratchet down the number of conferences, international meetings, roadshow events taking place in places other than the UN's existing centers. They are expensive and it is unclear what the long run value is as compared to simply undertaking the activity in existing venues, and often using existing processes. I suggest that the US adopt this as policy and simply announce that it is going for a moratorium on international conferences in favor of undertaking the actual negotiations giving rise to the conference in the venues and processes already existing. Pretty obviously, this is not a suggestion that is going anywhere, but it points to the difficulties in forcing highly diffuse UN agencies to have to make internal tradeoffs over scarce internal resources.
Maybe the EU will stick to its guns on its controversial airline emissions tax, but I somehow doubt they will not eventually be forced to cave. (Reuters) - Senate lawmakers and the Obama administration on Wednesday stiffened their opposition to a European law that targets emissions from commercial jetliners and applied new pressure on Brussels and the United Nations to resolve...
The brother of Abu Yahya al-Libi (the militant allegedly killed by a drone strike earlier this week), claims that the US’ drone program is inhumane and makes a mockery of the US claims of upholding human rights standards. IPS offers an opinion piece about how drones fire both ways. In what could have been retaliation for the killing of Abu Yahya...
This past Monday, my Taming Globalization co-author John Yoo and I hosted a number of scholars at an American Enterprise Institute conference to discuss the impact of globalization on U.S. sovereignty. We were fortunate to have the participation of smart and interesting scholars like Tom Lee of Fordham Law, Tai-heng Cheng of New York Law School and Quinn Emanuel, our own Peter...
Just a quick note of welcome to a new blog from my friends at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs. As I noted a while back, Ron Deibert and others have been putting together a great annual interdisciplinary conversation about cyberthreats, the most recent of which was Cyber Dialogue 2012. Now they're moving the conversation into blog form. The first...
More news in targeted strikes, complementing our book symposium this week: US officials claim that Abu Yahyi al-Libi, a high-level al-Qaeda militant, was killed in a CIA drone strike in northern Pakistan yesterday, despite Pakistan’s urging the US to stop the targeted killing program. A strike in Afghanistan aimed at a top-level official killed him as well as six Taliban fighters...
More today about targeted killing, to complement our book symposia: The US’ targeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders is straining relations with Pakistan, and Pakistan has condemned the most recent US drone strikes. Foreign Policy offers a look at the top Pakistani diplomat charged with renewing a good rapport with the US. The G7 will hold emergency talks about the Eurozone today. Talks...
Perhaps as a good primer to our upcoming book discussion this week, a few drone-related news items: Despite Pakistan's requests to the US to stop the program, the third drone strike in Pakistan in as many days has taken its toll on new victims; irrespective of the method of civilian or combatant counting, there are at least 27 dead. The Washington Post...
This week on Opinio Juris, Roger Alford marked Memorial Day with the Battle of Blenheim poem, and Deborah Pearlstein weighed in on the discussion about Chris Hayes’ controversial suggestion that the label of “hero” is too often used to refer to US service personnel. Deborah also posted a snippet from the NY Times report on Obama’s “Kill List” in the conflict...
Fred Shapiro and Michelle Pearse have just published in the Michigan Law Review "The Most-Cited Law Review Articles of All Time." It is a fascinating read, and includes some choice nuggets about international law scholarship. Among the more interesting findings is that of the recent era (1990-2009) only three international law scholars were among the most-cited: Curtis Bradley,...
