We have invited several academic luminaries to post here at Opinio Juris over the next few days about the ongoing situation in Syria. We also are going to follow in our own footsteps from our Kiobel symposium, by inviting young academics and practitioners to submit guests posts for possible publication. We can’t guarantee we will publish every post submitted, but we...
[Efrat Bouganim-Shaag, LL.B, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2012); Yael Naggan, LL.B and B.A. in International Relations graduate from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2013)] Last February, a report by the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea concluded that there are “nine patterns of violation” of rights, which "may amount to crimes...
Bill Schabas makes a great point regarding whether the Rome Statute should be interpreted to directly criminalize chemical weapons as part of its direct criminalization of poisoned weapons: I know that some colleagues are debating this elsewhere in the blogsphere. The argument seems to be that a broad construction of the notion of poison or poisonous weapons, whose use is criminalised...
It might be premature to declare the death of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention under international law, but there is no doubt that doctrine suffered a massive blow when the British Parliament voted against a preliminary motion in favor of military strikes on Syria. To be sure, humanitarian intervention was not directly before the Parliament, but the UK government's international...
I hate when interesting things happen while I'm sleeping. As I predicted, and as Marko Milanovic and Dov Jacobs have already well discussed, Judge Harhoff has been disqualified from the Seselj case as a result of the "private letter" he sent to 56 of his friends and acquaintances. Here is the key paragraph from the majority decision: 13. By referring to...
[David L. Attanasio is a professor of international law at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá, Colombia] The last few years have seen a rapidly changing landscape for serious human rights violations in the Americas. Instead of government abuses committed in the alleged fight against left-wing guerilla groups, militarized criminal organizations now perpetrate many, if not most, serious human rights violations...
Once again, the invaluable tumblr International Relations as Depicted by Cats captures my position perfectly. ...
I've been distracted the last few days by all this Syria stuff (and a nasty case of poison ivy), so I neglected to keep up with the latest on that Philippines-China UNCLOS arbitration now seated at the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. Luckily, Luke Petersen of Investment Arbitration Reporter is on the case and has this great post...
http://youtu.be/HRIF4_WzU1w Fifty years ago today, on the morning of August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King looked out from his suite at the Willard Hotel as crowds began mulling around the Washington monument. He had stayed up until four in the morning drafting and redrafting his speech. As King looked on, his aides were furiously typing the finished draft for...
An interesting discussion recently broke out on twitter about whether the Security Council could refer the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons -- and only the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons -- to the ICC. Instead of breaking my thoughts into 60 tweets or so, I thought I'd be old-fashioned and write a blog post instead. The issue raises a...
[Travel and other expenses related to my participation in the "100 Years Peace Palace" program provided by the Government of the Netherlands and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.] It is a bit surreal to be attending programs commemorating 100 years of the Peace Palace on a day when the news is filled with the possibility of US military intervention in Syria. Kevin and Julian have...
