Various blogpundits are warning that China’s new anti secession law is just a prelude to a pending invasion of Taiwan. As a descendant of a Taiwanese mother and Chinese father, with friends and relatives on both sides of the Taiwan Straits, I’ve been worried about such a conflict breaking out for years. On the other hand, since people have been...
I will be accompanying Hofstra's team to Vienna over the next week to compete in the Willem de Vis International Moot Arbitration Competition. This competition is actually a remarkable competition that draws 140 plus teams from around the world. My blogging will therefore be light or perhaps non-existent during that time, but I may break in periodically with dispatches from...
We here at Opinio Juris are planning to compile a list of what we consider to be “must reads” for anyone interested in international law. Until we build that part of the site, and because we have received some recent questions from readers as to what we would put in that category, I wanted to post an incomplete and somewhat...
Two South Korean protesters, one an elderly woman, cut off their fingers in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to protest Japan's claim to an obscure rocky uninhabited island off the Korean and Japanese coasts.In fact, there is a bit more at stake in the territorial dispute than it seems because, apparently, control of the uninhabited rocks will also...
Reuters reports that Nigeria is proposing an African court to try war crimes arising out of the Darfur crisis in Sudan. This may break the continuing deadlock (which I first discussed here)between the EU and the U.S. over whether the Security Council should refer Darfur to the ICC. Nigeria's proposal is exactly what the U.S. has been looking for. Whether...
The ICC held its first hearing yesterday, a status conference, on the investigation by its prosecutors of crimes committed in Democratic Republic of Congo. "It is the first time the International Criminal Court, which began work almost three years ago, is formally studying a specific war crimes investigation." Interestingly, the ICC's current docket consists exclusively of African investigations: Ivory Coast,...
Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog has written a useful primer on the Guantanamo cases moving through the courts....
The Washington Post weighs in today with a surprisingly sensible editorial applauding President Bush's decision to withdraw from the Optional Protocol to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (which I discussed here). Were the Optional Protocol a useful instrument in protecting Americans abroad, it might make sense to tolerate the international court's presumptuousness. But the protocol doesn't help much. Most...
Reports indicate the President is planning to submit DR-CAFTA to Congress in the next few weeks. This will trigger the 90 day clock for approval. This report suggests the President is still 20 votes short in the House. Get ready for a trade fight!...
Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSBlog usefully analyzes Texas's latest salvo in the ongoing battle over what to do with the Medellin case in the Supreme Court now that the President has sided with Medellin. Somewhat to my surprise, Texas is opposing Medellin's motion for a stay pending its state court litigation (which was prompted by the President's executive determination discussed here)....
As I had already posted, the Prime Minister of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for his actions as a commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army. CNN is now running an informative update on Haradinaj’s not-guilty plea on 37 counts and on the case in general.In other ICTY news, Gojko Jankovic, a...
Just in case the Bush Administration’s recent diplomatic initiatives were in danger of changing the President’s image, the LA Times reports on a new study finding that President Bush has signed fewer treaties at this point in his term than his predecessor Bill Clinton and even than his father.Now President Bush may indeed be unilateralist, and even anti-internationalist (and that...
