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03 Oct Kiobel Roundtable: The Devil in the Details
[Beth Stephens is Professor of Law at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey-Camden.] Monday’s oral argument in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, Inc. focused on the search for a coherent limit to the reach of the Alien Tort Statute. The need for some limit is uncontroversial: even the most ardent advocates of human rights accountability agree that not all cases involving human rights violations, no matter how egregious, belong in U.S. courts. The devil, as always, is in the details. Would a holding that the ATS does not apply...05 Apr Transnational NGOs, Accountability and Representation, and Global Governance
...position—simultaneously adopted by NGOs as a means of gaining admission to officialdom and assigned to them by international organization bureaucracies in search of legitimacy for themselves—on that most highly contested of issues, global governance. Peruzzotti and Charnovitz, in their respective chapters, disentangle these separate issues, accountability from global governance. To the extent they offer or critique policy proposals—such as Charnovitz’s skepticism that NGO regulation can or should somehow seek to force NGOs away from single-interest advocacy—they focus on the issue of accountability rather than representation. These authors would seem to...08 Apr The Ruto Trial Chamber Invents the Mistrial Without Prejudice
...lead sufficient evidence to necessitate a defence case, failing which the accused is to be acquitted on one or more of the counts before commencing that stage of the trial. It therefore considers that the test to be applied for a ‘no case to answer’ determination is whether or not, on the basis of a prima facie assessment of the evidence, there is a case, in the sense of whether there is sufficient evidence introduced on which, if accepted, a reasonable Trial Chamber could convict the accused. Notice the language:...23 Dec The 10 Most Read Posts of 2022
...– that we are encouraging a meta-conversation within our community about itself. At the same time, 2022 has been a tumultuous year for international law, marked by the COVID-19 Pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the passing of Judge Cançado Trindade. In the spirit of the new year, I thought I’d offer our readers a snapshot of what the year has been like at Opinio Juris, by listing the Top 10 most read articles of 2022. #10 Why 2+4 Does Not Always Add Up: In Search of NATO’s Non-Enlargement Promises,...17 Apr Taiwan’s New Adversarial System and the Overlooked Challenge of Efficiency-Driven Reforms
[Margaret K. Lewis is a Senior Research Fellow at NYU Law School’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute.] Thank you to the editors of the Virginia Journal of International Law and to Opinio Juris for providing this forum. My article grew out of work on legal reforms in Mainland China, which led to a cross-Strait project. As I learned more about Taiwan’s criminal justice system, I realized that Taiwan’s reform path presents an intriguing story of a legal transplant at a time when systems around the world are increasingly unmoored from the traditional...16 Jul Weekday News Wrap: Tuesday, July 16, 2013
A Bangladesh war crimes tribunal has found top Islamist party leader, Ghulam Azam, guilty of masterminding atrocities during the 1971 war of independence against Pakistan. Violent clashes occurred after the verdict was announced. Spain has apologized for its part in the events that led Bolivian President Evo Morales’ plane to be delayed earlier this month during an international search for Edward Snowden. Bangladesh approved a labor law to boost worker rights, including the freedom to form trade unions, after a factory building collapse in April killed 1,132 garment workers and...20 Nov Microfinance Meltdown in India
...reach to poor people in a commercial way; it’s not precisely microfinance, and not microfinance in the “faux-market” development sense I suggested earlier. It is the search for a genuinely commercial product of banking for the poor that provides capital and banking services — but which manages to cover costs and return a profit. NGO development programs cannot possibly serve the needs of all those people at that level; their specialization is with a different population of very poor people. For all these reasons and more, I have been supportive...29 Jul Cyber-Territoriality
...or should the U.S. (a) simply assert extra-territorial authority, on the trans-boundary effects rationale; (b) negotiate in advance to establish new international rules regarding cyber-entry and search; or (c) pursue more informal channels of resolving these territorial difficulties? Does the study of territoriality suggest a likely or perhaps a preferable solution? Officials involved in this activity would remain on U.S.soil, and would thus not need the sort of protective bubble SOFAs provide. But in the event agents might travel to any of the territories searched, I wonder if some comparable...20 Apr Kony 2012: The Complex Kaleidoscope of Transitional Justice in Uganda
[Michael A. Newton is Professor of the Practice of Law, Vanderbilt University Law School] The Kony 2012 campaign had the laudable goal of increasing public awareness in order to aid the search for justice and accountability in the wake of LRA atrocities. In fact, the worldwide attention had the paradoxical effect of demonstrating the lamentable reality that the optimal pathway towards authentic justice for LRA victims in that setting is neither simple nor self-obvious. This is true for a number of reasons which I shall summarize. Firstly, the complexity of...25 Jan The Art and Craft of International Environmental Law
...international law!” That really got me going, so I replied — somewhat pedantically — that I happened to be a professor of international law and that, as a legal matter, Norway is in compliance with the International Whaling Convention. He stomped off in search of greener pastures. I found the encounter fascinating because it illustrated so many themes in international environmental law: the intertwining of scientific and factual disputes, the special discursive power of legal argumentation, the various design features of international agreements. And I got to thinking, what could...