In association with the International Commission of Jurists

‘Law, Legitimacy and United Nations’ by Professor Ramesh Thakur

23 Nov

[Ramesh Thakur is a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, and Professor of Political Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada.] The UN is the site where power should be moderated by lawful authority. Legitimacy connects authority to power. The greater the gap between power and justice in world affairs, the greater the international legitimacy deficit. The...

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22 Nov

So thinks James P. Rubin in an Op-Ed in today's NY Times.  His argument comes in two parts.  First, a minority of the Senate plays an obstructionist role, which means that the United States simply doesn't join important treaties:  For much of the world, treaty ratification is a simple matter. In parliamentary systems like those in Britain and France, ratification is virtually automatic,...

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18 Nov

I don't have time to respond to the Ghailani verdict, which Julian notes below.  I would simply direct readers to Ben Wittes' superb post at Lawfare, in which he criticizes those who view the verdict as a vindication of the military commissions.  Here's a snippet: Second, it really is not clear that prosecutors would have fared better in a military...

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15 Nov

Gotta say, even though I write about issues of self-determination, secession, and statehood, I didn't expect to read this on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times: At a glance it looked like any small-town fair, with smoke wafting from the barbecue, families gathering around picnic tables, music percolating over loudspeakers and doting parents...

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12 Nov

While doing research for an essay on sentencing and the rights of defendants in international criminal law -- my contribution to the international law/Islamic law conference to which I'm now heading -- I stumbled across an exceptional essay by Shahram Dama, a professor at John Marshall Law School.  Here is the abstract: Although ranking among the most fundamental principles of criminal...

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11 Nov

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...

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10 Nov

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...

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08 Nov

"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...

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06 Nov

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...

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