Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
23 Mar The “Law Enforcement” War on Drugs
...potentially counterproductive. Finally, the law enforcement approach to the war on drugs is markedly different from the “war” approach to the war on terrorism, as this indictment symbolizes. The U.S. government is using its criminal laws, and presumably all of its criminal procedure protections, in its attempt to knock out a dangerous opponent, FARC. Why can’t it do the same to Al Qaeda? Then again, given the apparently never ending hopeless task of winning the war on drugs, perhaps the law enforcement approach is not all that attractive after all....
04 Jun ICL and Environmental Protection Symposium: International Criminal Law as a Tool for Corporate Responsibility for Environmental Crimes (Part I)
[Dr. Jelena Aparac is lecturer and legal advisor in international law, with a research focused on Business and Human Rights in Armed Conflicts; and a Member of the UN Working Group on mercenaries. This is the first part of a two-part post. This is part of a series of blog posts examining International Criminal Law and the Protection of the Environment, and stems from an expert meeting group convened at the Promise Institute for Human Rights at UCLA School of Law in February 2020.] The principal role of international law...
19 Nov The Identification of the EU as a New Kind of International Organisation
16 February 2022 concerning the conditionality mechanism and the rule of law. The Court establishes that the member states have first agreed on their common values and subsequently applied these values to their organisation. This legal observation not only strokes with the historical development of the EU from a union of democratic states to a European democracy but also embodies an entirely new conceptual approach to the process of international cooperation between States. It refutes the Westphalian assumption that the EU should either become a state or an organisation of...
20 Feb Tertium datur: A Step Towards Squaring the Circle on the Current Meaning of Self-defence?
[Tarcisio Gazzini is Professor of International Law at the University of Padova (Italy). He is the author of The Changing Rules on the Use of Force in International Law (Manchester University Press, 2006) and a founding editor of the book series Nijhoff International Investment Law and of Journal du droit transnational] Introduction Self-defence has become a legally intractable subject. Article 51 of the UN Charter was drafted in 1945 having in mind the second world conflict. It is disputed whether it is fit for purpose to regulate the use of...12 Apr Can the PTC Review the Interests of Justice?
...Pre-Trial Chamber can review it (Article 53(3)(b)). The only job of the PTC when the Prosecutor requests the opening of an investigation is to determine jurisdiction and admissibility. And the “interests of justice” fall under neither of these categories. As I will explain in my next post, I completely reject the PTC’s approach to the “interests of justice” — for reasons Dov touches on. But I disagree with the idea that the PTC acted ultra vires by second-guessing the OTP’s belief that the interests of justice did not counsel against...24 Feb Medellín’s Influence on the Judicial Application of Treaties
authors claim. To understand why, it is necessary to discuss judicial practice before Medellín. According to IL at Home, in the period from World War II to Medellín, “the lower federal courts developed a bifurcated approach to treaty enforcement.” Id. at 64. They “continued to infer a private right of action for treaties that involved economic or commercial relations. But they began taking a more skeptical approach toward treaties . . . regulating the relationship between the state and the individual.” Id. at 64-65. This claim is mostly right, but...21 Oct YJIL Symposium – Response to Elena Baylis
...that these democratic policymaking institutions—and U.S. human rights policy as a whole, which is not determined exclusively by either body—are best understood as having no culturally fixed or structurally predetermined approach to engagement, either at the stage of human rights treaty ratification or post-ratification treaty body engagement. (This is precisely what distinguishes an interest-management narrative from an exceptionalist one.) Rather, U.S. policy institutions are better understood as mediating bodies that seek to maximally accommodate the competing (and constantly evolving) interests exerted on them both at the foreign-policy level (from realists...
18 Oct A Call for Accountability: Violations Against Victims in Afghanistan Are Violations Against Us All
requires a more robust approach, namely — the immediate establishment of an independent investigative mechanism. Until now, States have adopted a softer approach to the human rights situation in Afghanistan, maintaining hope for positive progress by the Taliban. States are still under the view that more time is needed for the de facto authorities to change course. However, after over one year, the Taliban have not kept their promises and have unequivocally proven that they will not do so — failing to meet the terms of the Doha Agreement and...02 Mar Fighting for Freedoms: Supreme Court In 21st Century (Part 1)
...of the rule of law.” Unfortunately, in the initial period, the Supreme Court adopted a conservative approach, by reading only the literal text of the Constitution, treating each fundamental right as a separate chapter. In doing so, as it turned out, the Court essentially ended up working as the protector of the landed gentry, reaching a climactic conclusion with the infamous ADM Jabalpur case, in the aftermath of the Emergency. Recall that a majority of the constitutional bench, in that case, barring Justice HR Khanna, agreed with the government that...21 Oct YJIL Symposium – Response to Professor Melish
...& mechanisms that will facilitate domestic democratic deliberation over local incorporation and adaptation of human rights norms. This is an intriguing proposal, but it doesn’ t resolve the paradox of the U.S. approach to international human rights law; rather, it suggests a shift in our understanding of what the paradox is. As Tara herself puts it, the U.S. “upsets first principles of international human rights law” by “invoking only subsidiarity’s negative side” without providing mechanisms for international support and consultation, in complement to domestic deliberative processes (p. 454) In other...