Our friends at the University of Amsterdam's Center for International Law have asked us to announce the European Science Foundation's upcoming conference, The Responsibility to Protect: From Principle to Practice. Here is the description of the conference, which sounds like it's well worth attending: Five years after its acceptance by the 2005 World Summit, it is time to consider the...
Japan triumphs in a big way at the CITES meeting in Doha, as the U.S. proposed ban on bluefin tuna trade goes down 20-68. The rejection of the bluefin proposal was a clear victory for the Japanese government, which had vowed to go all out to stop the measure or else exempt itself from complying with it. Japan, which consumes nearly...
I am not a huge fan of restrictive and protectionist trade policy, but I can't offer any serious legal quarrel with the recently proposed Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment Act by the growing anti-trade bloc in the U.S. Congress. As Lori Wallach from Public Citizen notes, the Act offers a radically new approach to U.S. trade policy. The Act explicitly...
Sure there is some dispute about settlements in East Jerusalem, or something, but here are some international law disputes that really matter. At CoP15, or the 15th Meeting of the Parties to the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species - currently going on in Doha, parties are discussing: resuming (or not resuming) the trade in ivory and imposing a...
The following is a guest post by Lt. Col. Chris Jenks, the Chief of the International Law Branch in the U.S. Army's Office of the Judge Advocate General. Lt. Col. Jenks is posting in his personal capacity. On March 8th, the Supreme Court "invited" the Solicitor General to file a brief in Carmichael v. Kellogg, Brown & Root...
In the long-running battle between Chevron and Ecuador over environmental damage, a federal court in New York has denied Ecuador's motion to stay arbitration of a Ecuador-U.S. BIT claim. In September 2009, Chevron filed a notice of arbitration alleging, among other things, that "Ecuador has breached ...
It is always unpleasant to get lectured by foreign governments about "violating international law", but this is something U.S. government officials should be used to. Still, it must be galling for the new U.S. administration to be lectured by Brazil's president over U.S. non-compliance with a WTO ruling on cotton subsidies. The United States must comply with a World Trade Organization...
Yesterday, the Japanese Government (now led by the Democratic Party after nearly five-plus decades of rule by the Liberal Democratic Party) confirmed that in the 1960s Japan and the United States entered into a series of secret defense pacts. Specifically, a committee of scholars has identified various tacit agreements allowing U.S. warships to carry nuclear weapons into Japanese ports, granting unrestricted use of...
I'm not exactly surprised to read this: United Nations human rights investigators called on the Obama administration on Tuesday to prosecute the accused September 11 masterminds in a civilian court, declaring that U.S. military tribunals would not be fair. The White House is reviewing options to bring the 9/11 detainees to justice and U.S. officials said on Friday senior administration officials may...
Amid the war of words between Germans and Greeks over a possible Greek bailout, the Deputy Prime Minister of Greece has accused the Germans of stealing "the Greek gold that was in the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back...
As I have noted earlier, there is a pitched battle between victims of Pan Am 73 terrorist hijacking over the distribution of treaty funds secured by the United States for American victims in a 2008 diplomatic settlement with Libya. The treaty and Executive Order stipulate that the money shall be distributed solely for the benefit of United States nationals,...
Politico (linked here to Yahoo) carries a story today on a letter drafted by Benjamin Wittes and signed by a number of conservative and centrists lawyers, former Bush administration officials, and policy analysts on conservative attacks on the role of lawyers in terrorism cases - the so-called Al Qaeda 7 at the Justice Department. I'm one of the signers, but...
