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04 May Weekly News Wrap: Monday, May 4, 2015
...conflict said on Saturday. Following a string of horrific botched executions, the US Supreme Court is considering a case that could lead to a ban on lethal injections. Oceania Australia’s police force on Monday defended its involvement in tracking an international drug smuggling network that culminated in the execution of two Australians by firing squad in Indonesia last week. UN/World Key infrastructure in war-torn Yemen, including water supplies, health services and telecommunications, are on the verge of breaking down due to a major fuel shortage, a United Nations humanitarian official...
01 Dec A Hypothetical About the Beginning of IAC
...and comment on — the following scenario. I have constructed it to focus on the “first shot” issue, making the attack consistent with the jus ad bellum. State X has reliable intelligence that State Y has been directing the actions of a terrorist group responsible for a string of deadly attacks in State X. State X and State Y have never previously engaged in direct hostilities, though they have long had a hostile diplomatic relationship. State X learns that the general in State Y who has been orchestrating the terrorist...20 Mar Kosovo Independence is a “Defeat for International Law”
Or so says Professor (and sometime-guest blogger) Eugene Kontorovich in a recent op-ed. As a result, NATO and America have become parties to the carve-up a sovereign state that they subdued by force. To say that this goes against the core principles of the U.N. Charter is an understatement. For international law, the entire process is a string of humiliations. The Security Council comes out looking like a joke; the right of self-determination looks like it depends on the product of a group’s ruthlessness and proximity to Europe; peacekeepers are...14 Oct Guest Post: Air Strikes in Syria–Questions Surrounding the Necessity and Proportionality Requirements in the Exercise of Self-Defense
[Sina Etezazian serves as regional coordinator for the Digest of State Practice at the Journal on the Use of Force and International Law. He is also a PhD candidate at Monash Law School, where he is researching the necessity and proportionality criteria for the exercise of self-defense in international law.] The lawfulness of conducting air strikes against the Islamic State Group (IS) in Syria is attracting increasing scrutiny from legal commentators. This scrutiny has intensified markedly (for example, see here, here, here, and here) since the UK’s targeting of alleged...16 Feb Ohlin on Targeting and the Concept of Intent
...applying this law in a string of little-noticed decisions have completely upended this understanding. Armed with criminal law principles from their own domestic systems, often civil law jurisdictions, prosecutors, judges and even scholars have progressively redefined what it means to “intentionally” target a civilian population. In particular, these accounts rely on the civil law notion of dolus eventualis, a mental state akin to common law recklessness that differs in at least one crucial respect: it classifies risk-taking behavior as a species of intent. This problem represents a clash of legal...11 Mar Can a Bad Gift Affect International Relations?
I was amused to read about the kerfuffle in the UK over the supposedly rude treatment UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his wife received during his recent White House visit. London newspapers are howling over a string of alleged snubs by Obama to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown during his visit to Washington last week — including a squabble over presidential gift-giving. “President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain,” sniffed The Daily Telegraph Friday. “His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was...21 Dec LJIL Symposium: Response to Samantha Besson
[Cedric Ryngaert is an Associate Professor at KU Leuven and the University of Utrecht] Samantha Besson has provided a fine normative account of the extraterritorial application of the ECHR. At the same time, she believes that this account may well offer a rationalization of the string of controversial ECtHR decisions in this matter. Besson’s argument may or may not have explanatory power as regards the ECtHR case-law, but what is sure is that the Court will be happy to hear that, as far as extraterritoriality is concerned, it can at...
28 Nov Symposium on Open Source Investigation Labs: The Aesthetic Language of Open Source Investigations: The Image of Truth and the Demand for Action
[Dr. Imar de Vries is a media scholar at Utrecht University whose research explores the cultural histories, social imaginaries, and ideologies surrounding media, communication, and emerging digital technologies Dr. Henning Lahmann is an assistant professor at eLaw – Center for Law and Digital Technologies at Leiden University Law School] In 2010, at a conference organised by independent Dutch investigative journalism platform Follow the Money, multimedia design studio Catalogtree had been invited to present and discuss their 2008 poster series “Flocking Diplomats”. Based on a dataset consisting of all parking violations...06 Nov U.S. Takes Its Lumps at the U.N. Human Rights Council: Is it Worth It?
...subjected its rights record to examination before the Geneva-based council, as part of a procedure that requires all states to allow their counterparts to grade their conduct. Several delegations camped out overnight to be first in line to criticize Washington, with the initial few speakers including Cuba, Iran and Venezuela. … The United States’ most vociferous critics – Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, North Korea and Venezuela – opened the session with a string of highly critical accounts of U.S. policies, denouncing detention policies from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay and characterizing...