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15 Dec Red herrings in debates over climate finance
...substantive deal, notwithstanding a new Mexican-Norwegian joint proposal. Word in the corridors point more in the direction of a fudge, whereby short-term funding proposals will be made (like the recent EU announcement or the declaration at the Commonwealth summit); long-term institutional and financing questions will remain open for further discussions. But discussions on emissions reductions or low energy intensity targets without thinking about where the money will come from suggest a strategy of putting the cart before the horse. Remember that the Montreal Protocol needed the London Amendments of 1990,...01 May Law and Ethics for Robot Soldiers
...is ultimately a modest one – a quite traditional (at least from the US government’s long-term perspective) approach to weapons regulation. Grand treaties seem to us unlikely to be suitable to incremental technological change, particularly as they might seek to imagine a technological end-state that might come about as anticipated, but might develop in some quite unexpected way. Sweeping and categorical pronouncements can re-state fundamental principles of the laws of war, but they are unlikely to be very useful in addressing the highly specific and contingent facts of particular systems...
17 Feb Increasing the Odds for Jockeys Riding Three-Legged Horses: A Way to Strengthen the Effectiveness of the Elected Members on the UN Security Council
...Article 3 violations act in dereliction of the obligation to “ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions. Potential for evolution It would be naïve to assume that permanent members would openly embrace these arguments. The promise that a more effective Council could reduce some of the cycles of recurring violence around the world, does not appear to lie within the short-term horizon of most of today’s decision makers. Apparently neither are advantages like slowing the need for ever increasing humanitarian assistance; reducing migratory pressures of people being forced to become refugees by...
28 Mar Truth Commissions and Bureaucratic Harms: A Call for Humility in Transitional Justice
[Adriana Rudling (@adrianarudling) is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Chr Michelsen Institute, Bergen Norway and a Post-Doctoral Visiting Fellow at the Instituto Pensar, Bogota, Colombia working on issues relating to the interactions between victims and transitional justice mechanisms.] The practice of transitional justice (TJ), and particularly truth commissions, emerges as “the bureaucratic response to bureaucratic murder” (p. 78). Given the perils of human rights prosecutions in the immediate aftermath of negotiated, often fragile, transitions, truth commissions were initially adopted as a second-best option to dealing with the human rights abuses...11 Feb Cooley on How the U.S. Lost its Base in Kyrgyzstan
...will signal to other global U.S. base hosts that they, too, can unilaterally abrogate and renegotiate access arrangements and use the interest of geopolitical rivals such as Russia and China for short-term economic leverage. The long-term damage to American interests worldwide would be great. Instead, U.S. officials in their last-minute discussions can offer to organize a multilateral conference for Kyrgyzdebt restructuring and forgiveness, and encourage EU member states active in the Afghanistan campaign to expand their economic engagement with the Central Asian country. They should emphasize that trans-Atlantic commitments are...
19 Nov The Identification of the EU as a New Kind of International Organisation
...State, that the Member States are the Masters of the Treaties and that, as a consequence thereof, the EU does not have the compétence de la compétence. Four years afterwards, the EU Court of Justice settled the dispute by confirming in unambiguous terms ‘that the European Union is, under international law, precluded by its very nature from being considered as a State’ (Opinion 2/13 of 14 December 2014, ECLI:EU:C:2014:2454). …nor Union of States It is equally obvious that the EU cannot be regarded as a union of states either. Although...