The Washington Post has an interesting story in the Sunday, February 22, 2009, edition (A16) by its longtime UN reporter, Colum Lynch, "With Rivals in Key Posts, U.S. Faces Hurdles at U.N." The article points out that many key UN posts are occupied by countries, and often individuals, hostile to the United States. The General Assembly, for example, is headed by...
Again, this news is not exactly shocking: The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.In a two-sentence filing late Friday, the Justice Department said that the new administration had reviewed its position in a case brought by...
As this BBC report suggests, investigating war crimes in the Israel-Gaza conflict is a pretty much hopeless task because there is no single entity with the expertise, knowledge, and legitimacy to find out the "truth." Any investigation, whether it is the UN or the ICC or Human Rights Watch, will be simply dismissed by the two sides as biased. So...
It’s not as though this is a new problem in American rights law. The expansion of defenses like qualified immunity for federal officials, the statutory restrictions on collateral federal review of state criminal convictions with constitutional infirmities, the stark limitations on common law constitutional remedies in the courts – all of these areas of doctrine accept the idea that...
This story in the continuing saga of Bowoto v. Chevron should give human rights litigants pause: Chevron Corp., which prevailed in a human-rights lawsuit seeking to hold it responsible for the shooting of Nigerian protesters at an oil platform, is seeking nearly $500,000 in legal costs from the villagers who brought the suit. Chevron's claim for reimbursement, filed in...
Last week I posted this excellent essay by Professor Kontorovich of Northwestern Law arguing that the anti-piracy efforts are unlikely to succeed as currently constituted. One problem I've noted is that there is no obvious place to try captured pirates from Somalia. The U.S. Navy's plan is to try pirates in nearby Kenya. As this WSJ article suggests, this strategy is...
In an effort to put its sordid past behind it -- Nisour Square was so 2007 -- Blackwater Worldwide has announced that it shall henceforth be referred to not as "Blackwater," but as "Xe" -- pronounced like the letter "Z." But why stop there? Why not go full Prince and replace the Blackwater name with a symbol that represents what the...
The collision of two satellites in orbit around the earth, creating a cloud of debris and some amount of risk to the international space station, turns our thoughts to the international law of space. And thence to Glenn Harlan Reynolds, who explains it for us in a column at Popular Mechanics. I, for one, was surprised to actually read the...
Two hundred years of Lincoln, February 12, 1809. ...
There is an interesting discussion going on at Alex De Waal's blog Making Sense of Darfur about the various theories of liability that might be used to hold Bashir responsible for genocide. The discussion as a whole is well worth checking out; what I want to discuss here is whether Bashir could be convicted of genocide via JCE III, so-called...
Alexander Cooley of Barnard College and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University has an op-ed in the International Herald Tribune looking into how and why the U.S. is in the process of losing its air base in Kyrgyzstan. The story really gives a sense of the brass tacks of the so-called New Great Game: actually a not-so-great game of payoffs, more payoffs, threats, and...
[Opinio Juris is pleased to present this essay by Professor Eugene Kontorovich of Northwestern Law School on the relationship between international law and anti-piracy efforts. Please be sure to click "continue reading" to read the whole essay.] The successful ransom by Somali pirates of a Ukrainian freighter laden with arms and armor is indicative of the broader failure of the...
