In association with the International Commission of Jurists

General

15 Oct

Wow! I know there has been some talk and some cases about an international right to internet access. But Finland has upped the ante by guaranteeing a right to high speed internet access. Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has made 1-megabit broadband Web access a legal right, YLE, the country's national broadcasting company, reported on Wednesday. According to the report, every person...

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15 Oct

It sure looks like it, according to Bloomberg. The Pentagon is reviewing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive military strikes with an eye to modifying or possibly ending it. The international environment is “more complex” than when President George W. Bush announced the policy in 2002, Kathleen Hicks, the Defense Department’s deputy undersecretary for strategy, said in an interview. “We’d really like to...

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14 Oct

Kristen Boon of Seton Hall Law School (and occasional Opinio Juris guest-blogger) has sent in the following call for questions/ topics for a roundtable at International Law Weekend entitled Overlapping Threats / Overlapping Jurisdictions: International Law in the Face of New Threats to Peace and Security. She writes: Climate change, swine flu, the global financial crisis, and drug trafficking pose significant...

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12 Oct

I had the good fortune to be invited to lecture to Jack Goldsmith's class on Cyberwar and Cybercrime at Harvard Law School last week to discuss my arguments for why we need new international law rules for cyberconflicts.  While there, a student flagged for me a new journal--the Harvard National Security Journal--that's literally and figuratively coming on-line right now.  Here's how their web-page...

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12 Oct

Charli Carpenter has an interesting short commentary over at RFE/RFL discussing the recently released fact-finding report on the Georgia-Russia war.  I have not had a chance to read the report, so I won't comment myself (I said something about my experiences as a human rights monitor of the early 1990s phase of the civil war, and then followed up with...

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10 Oct

I don't usually plug products on the blog, but I'm going to make an exception for the Ectaco C-Pen 20, the pen scanner that I've been using to organize the research for my book on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: I don't know how others work, but I write a very detailed outline of an article and then cut-and-paste all...

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08 Oct

I've posted lots here about targeted killing, and written about it for publication, as well.  I'll be on NPR's All Things Considered today, in a story by correspondent Ari Shapiro, talking about targeted killings in relation to detention and interrogation.  (Now that I've seen the story, I see with pleasure that it also quotes Matthew Waxman, Vijay Padmanabhan, John Bellinger,...

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07 Oct

Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute suggests that the U.S. is endorsing a less than robust view of the right to free expression in a recent Human Rights Council resolution sponsored by the U.S. (along with Egypt).  The resolution does appear to give an unusual amount of lip service to the combatting racism and discrimination (given its topic), but it...

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07 Oct

Are the two breakaway sections of Georgia (South Ossetia  & Abhkazia) states? If not, why is Kosovo a state? The difficulty international lawyers have in answering these questions suggests that the most basic and fundamental questions of international law remain unresolved and deeply contested.  What are the requirements for statehood?  There are some generally accepted criteria, under international law, but they...

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