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10 Dec

...11:30 PM, the French presidency convened a smaller, closed meeting (known as an Indaba, a term that originated at the 2011 Durban COP), which reportedly ran until 7:30 AM. Apparently, the Indaba made little progress in bridging differences, so the French are now conducting bilateral consultations with a wide variety of countries, to try to reach agreement on “landing zones” for the various issues in the text. Interestingly, the issue that was probably raised most frequently last night in the public meeting of the Paris Committee was the need to...
10.12.15 | |

16 Jun

...offence under Peru’s current Constitution). Even more concerning, in a leaked 2019 audio, Peru Libre’s elected Congressman and high-ranking party member, Guillermo Bermejo described the plan as a “first step to stay in power” beyond their five year term, referring to term limitations and Peru’s constitutional ban on re-election as “democratic b******t”. It is because of all of this that Human Rights Watch called Peru’s runoff election a choice between “two candidates that do not believe in human rights and the rule of law” and why Amnesty International felt the...
16.06.21 | |

30 Mar

...originated in a live animal market in Wuhan were confirmed, it would be a painful demonstration of the failure of existing legal regimes to protect the wildlife. The possibility that the pangolin might have been an intermediary host turns the spotlight on the challenges facing the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). While the Convention transferred all eight pangolin species to its Appendix I, prohibiting their international commercial trade, in 2016, pangolins remained nevertheless the world’s most trafficked mammal (Wildlife Justice Commission). 2....
30.03.20 | |

06 Nov

...such acts could also amount to persecution under Article 7(1)(h) (see here, para. 76).  Deportation presumes transfer beyond State borders whereas forced transfer entails displacements within a State. The ICC Elements of Crimes specify that the terms “deported or forcibly transferred” are interchangeable with “forcibly displaced” (see footnote 14), and that “[t]he term ‘forcibly’ is not restricted to physical force, but may include threat of force or coercion, such as that caused by fear of violence, duress, detention, psychological oppression, or abuse of power against such person or persons or...
06.11.23 | and |

08 Nov

The General Assembly and Security Council has selected five members for the next ICJ term. One of members, Thomas Buergenthal of the United States, is a returning judge. The rest, however, are all newbies. As I discussed before, some countries not effectively guaranteed a seat by the Security Council have launched semi-aggressive efforts to get their members on the Court. In that race among smaller countries, New Zealand, Morocco, and Mexico appears to have won. An excerpt from the official press release follows: THE HAGUE, 8 November 2005. Yesterday, the...
08.11.05 | |

16 Nov

[ Somaly Kum is a research fellow at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law in Cambodia who, since 2010, has worked closely with survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime through outreach programs of the Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice (Cambodia program) and ADHOC. Boravin Tann is a researcher and lecturer at the Center for the Study of Humanitarian Law , Royal University of Law and Economics since 2017, whose research concerns the transitional justice process in Cambodia, including victim participation and genocide education of the...
16.11.22 | and |

20 Aug

...Ba’s arguments from a South African perspective is illuminating because he has developed a theoretical framework for making sense of the apparently contradictory tendencies in the way the country has engaged the ICC. South Africa is one of the brief case studies discussed in chapter 7 as one of the states that has initiated proceedings to withdraw from the Rome Statute. Ba describes South Africa’s decision as ‘the only outlier’ among cases and explains the decision in terms of the country’s role as a regional leader that wants to protect...
20.08.20 | |

26 Feb

...countries which are leased long-term from host nations or held de facto for the long-term by the U.S. military. I think it would be dangerous and unwise for the Supreme Court to decide that potentially all aliens in the world outside the U.S. and its territories have individual constitutional rights. Clear and sensible lines need to be drawn to determine what is or is not a territory of the United States in which aliens have constitutional protections. I am working on an article that argues that these lines should be...
26.02.07 | |

04 Oct

...have to slow that down. What Senator Biden refers to is the Obama-Biden foreign assistance position of the campaign (specifically with respect to Africa): Fight Poverty: Obama and Joe Biden will double our annual investment in foreign assistance from $25 billion in 2008 to $50 billion by the end of his first term and make the Millennium Development Goals, which aim to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015, America’s goals. They will fully fund debt cancellation for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries in order to provide sustainable debt relief and...
04.10.08 | |

05 Mar

Sometimes oral argument really does reflect what is going on in the Justices’ minds. The Supreme Court will hear reargument in Kiobel next term (meaning October or so). The Supreme Court on Monday put over to its next Term a major case on lawsuits against corporations for human rights abuses in foreign countries, and ordered lawyers to come back with an expanded argument on Congress’s power to pass laws that reach overseas. The case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum (docket 10-1491) was heard just last Tuesday, and some of...
05.03.12 | |

26 Mar

...preserving the global environment. Understanding how a regime will function depends on having a theory of government preferences. This is particular true with secondary rules. All remedy systems, like international law more broadly, needs to be self-enforcing (another major theme of the book). Governments must accept the remedy rules of a treaty regime – even if they breach the treaty’s substantive rules – or the regime won’t be sustainable. This requires an understanding of how government interests develop and change, including how the government trades off long-term versus short-term interests....
26.03.13 | |

07 Mar

...“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...
07.03.11 | |