This is a wild tale of self-execution (which, I'm fairly sure, is the first time anyone has used the adjective "wild" to describe the self-execution concept). For years, the Bush Administration sought to get the U.S. Congress to amend the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) to ease licensing restrictions on arms exports to two of the United States' closest allies -- the...
In the past twenty years the world of investment arbitration has taken the commercial world by storm. There are over 2,750 bilateral investment treaties and almost every one of them has an arbitration provision. Investment arbitration is now a prominent feature of the arbitration landscape. Just as BITs have proliferated in recent years, so too have free...
"By no means should Google Maps be used as a reference to decide military actions between two countries." That's the official response from Google to news reports that Nicaragua invaded Costa Rica based on Google's improper drawing of the border. Details from the Tico Times. And no, the link is not to the Onion. The more serious question...
I understand the rationale behind the Obama Administration's policy of engagement with the U.N. Human Rights Council. So I understand why U.S. delegates subjected themselves to sharp and sometimes ridiculous criticism by other states during a session yesterday on United States human rights practices. A delegation of top officials, led by Assistant Secretary of State Esther Brimmer, gave diplomats at the...
A couple of weeks ago, New Stream Dream accused me of never believing individuals who -- like Khadr and Lynne Stewart -- confess to committing crimes. Well, I believe this confession: In his book, titled "Decision Points," Bush recounts being asked by the CIA whether it could proceed with waterboarding Mohammed, who Bush said was suspected of knowing about...
The following is a guest post by David Glazier, an Associate Professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. As Opinio Juris readers likely recall, there are two ongoing federal prosecutions in Norfolk, Virginia before different judges of Somali pirates who made the boneheaded mistakes of attempting attacks on two separate U.S. Navy warships. (Hey, it was dark!) In the first...
At least the war criminal lost: The basic facts are undisputed: on 15 April 2004 Ilario Pantano, then a second lieutenant with the US marines, stopped and detained two Iraqi men in a car near Falluja. The Iraqis were unarmed and the car found to be empty of weapons. Pantano ordered the two men to search the car...
I have bumped Dave's comment to the main page, because it's worth a read -- and not just because it supports my claim that Khadr will serve no more than two years in a Canadian prison...
One of the most significant questions under GATT Article XX is whether States can violate WTO rules in order to protect against foreign harms. It is an issue that has plagued the GATT/WTO for almost twenty years, most famously in the Tuna-Dolphin and US--Shrimp cases. If, for example, Article XX(b) allows departures from WTO rules "to protect human,...
This according to AP: The sentence was handed down Sunday under a plea bargain in which the young Canadian admitted to five war crimes charges, including killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan. Under the deal, the judge was limited to the eight-year sentence and had to ignore the recommendation of a military jury that Khadr serve 40...
Human Rights Watch's Tom Malinowski and Ben Wittes -- whom, for the record, I consider a friend -- have been having an interesting and useful dialogue about targeted killing. Here is how Malinowski lays out HRW's position: Our position on targeted killing is that its use can be legally justified so long as it is limited to situations involving a...
Last week I had the privilege to attend an investment arbitration conference and FDI moot court competition at Pepperdine. Kudos to Murdoch University of Australia for winning the competition and my alma mater NYU for winning the highest overall ranking. There was much to ponder in the conference from the likes of Andrea Bjorkland, Todd Weiler, Anna Joubin-Bret...
