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29 Mar ASIL Cables: 2012 Grotius Lecture
...President George W. Bush’s first term, Taft commended Kellenberger for his insistence that the Geneva Conventions be respected “in the conflict with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups.” (Taft himself had been on the losing end of a struggle within the administration over whether Geneva Convention protections applied to Taliban and Al Qaeda members captured in Afghanistan.) Taft’s references to the “conflict with Al Qaeda”—a phrase he used twice—reflect the view, which the present U.S. administration shares, that the United States is engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda...
06 Jul Three Ways to Improve Victim Participation in the Rohingya Context
...potential violations of the Genocide Convention would mean victims who are the subject of the proceedings would reach into the millions and be scattered around the world. These are numbers the size of small cities. Recognising these challenges, this article aims to provide practical recommendations of what action can be taken now to better involve the victim community in an equitable and systematic way. Develop a long-term engagement plan Any strategy to facilitate the participation of victims must take a longitudinal approach. The community will be receiving information about the...05 Apr The Situation in Palestine
...International Criminal Court has contrived to reject the existence of the state of Palestine. Writing in 2009 on behalf of Al-Haq, and advocating that the Prosecutor accept the Palestinian declaration, the point was made that while the existence of the state of Palestine was indeed moot for the purpose of international law and international relations generally speaking, there was adequate factual and legal justification for the ICC to accept Palestine’s article 12.3 declaration. It was suggested that ‘a determination by the Court that Palestine is a state that can engage...09 Sep Burundi “A General Climate of Impunity” – the Latest UN Commission of Inquiry on Burundi Report
...President Pierre Nkurunziza ran for a controversial third term deemed by many to be unconstitutional thereby triggering protests and strong opposition to his bid for yet another term in office. Nkurunziza’s forces responded violently and swiftly. The situation attracted the attention of the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor and a preliminary examination was announced on 25 April 2016. At that point more than 430 persons had been killed and an estimated 3,400 people had been arrested whilst over 230,000 had fled the country. On 25 October 2017, the Prosecutor received authorisation...23 May Senate Foreign Relations Committee Takes on the AUMF
...breathless article (previewing the Senate hearing) about the terrorist “threat that gathers overseas,” relying in part (again) on the I’d thought debunked notion that “Al Qaeda” now enjoys a safe haven in Iraq. Articles like that one make a lot of people nervous. But they bear deeply questionable relationship to the nature of the near-term or longer term threat we actually face. What is the nature of the threat to the United States or its interests posed by terrorist groups other than AQAP? I’m not sure. I am sure that...
02 Apr Symposium on Military AI and the Law of Armed Conflict: Front- and Back-End Accountability for Military AI
history,” in part because it focuses on “DARPA hard” (*cough**mindbogglingly implausible**cough*) research, like growing plants that sense national security threats (Advanced Plant Technologies (APT)), enabling scalable quantum computers (Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (ONISQ)), and exploring space-based biomanufacturing methods to convert astronaut waste into useful materials (Biomanufacturing: Survival, Utility, and Reliability beyond Earth (B-SURE)). As relevant to this symposium, DARPA is at the forefront of U.S. military AI research and development. To address AI’s general inability to extrapolate from one scenario to another, the Science of Artificial Intelligence and Learning...
05 Jun A War on a Virus? Human Rights, Biology and Reshaping Society
...spread of the virus worldwide; the issue at hand is the unchecked responses by states, that seem to ignore their negative obligations in the name of their public health statutes – provisions against arbitrary detention, expedited (or delayed) trials, non-refoulement because of closed borders, privacy, and so many others. Too often amiss from parliamentary review because not including the term of “state of emergency”, but rather “public health acts”, the legislation itself appears innocuous. In political speeches however, states are at war. French president Emmanuel Macron used the term no...31 Jan It’s Official: Antarctica Is (Not) a Foreign Country
If you earn income on a research expedition in Antarctica, can you claim a tax exemption for foreign earned income? The tax regulations allow an exclusion from gross income for any foreign earned income, but the latter term is defined as residency for a qualified period in a “foreign country.” The United States Tax Court ruled this week in Arnett v. United States that Antarctica is not a foreign country and therefore income earned there is fully taxable. “The term “foreign country” when used in a geographical sense includes any...
30 Jan Judge David Re Cautioned against Further Litigation, Proceeds with Further Litigation
[Cale Davis is a PhD candidate at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies at Leiden University in The Netherlands. He was previously a Prosecutor with the Northern Territory DPP and a Judge’s Associate at the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in Australia. His research concerns prosecutorial discretion in international criminal justice.] If the Special Tribunal for Lebanon’s (STL) judiciary was hoping for a relaxed Christmas break and a slow January, they have been sorely disappointed. In a remarkable twist to the saga surrounding the appointment of judges...07 Mar Humanitarian Intervention in Libya: Follow-up Post
...“illegal”). Someone like me would shrug and say, a General Assembly resolution is not binding, per the terms of the Charter — but it is perfectly correct to respond to that and say, we’re not talking here about legally binding, but about your own preferred term of political legitimacy. The GA resolution is important beyond its formal legal status, precisely because it denies such Kosovo-type actions political legitimacy, at least from here going forward. (ii) R2P ‘legal’ as an extension of self-defense or defense of others The second path, if...