Search: crossing lines
31 Jul The al-Marwalah Detention
...Ben’s paradigmatic case for noncriminal detention illustrates the dangers. He points us to one GTMO detainee, Bashir Nasir al-Marwalah (p.158), and tells us that this is what the evidence shows: al-Marwalah attended a training camp in Afghanistan in 2000, at which he had rifle training on how to be a sniper. His stated goal was to learn to fight in Chechnya. He was caught while retreating, “with” the Taliban, from “the back lines” of the fight with the Northern Alliance. Ben does not suggest that he had been fighting the...04 Jun So What Is the Legacy of Tiananmen, Twenty Years On?
...to say, as a pro bono gift of Sullivan & Cromwell. Tiananmen took place while all of us were there; it was discussed at length, but the conference declined to make a joint statement, if I recall correctly. I think that was the right decision – no one at the meeting was authorized to speak on behalf of their organizations, to start with. Somewhat more disturbing was that not everyone at the conference appeared to think that the Chinese protestors had a defensible cause. The fault lines of the human...
18 Mar ENMOD: Dodo, Dormant or Presciently Divine?
...is a 1977 convention that prohibits its contracting parties from engaging in “military or any other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party” (Article I). It is the treaty at the source of Principle 17 of the UN International Law Commission’s Principles on the Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflict, and Rule 3.B of the ICRC Guidelines on the Protection of the Natural Environment in Armed Conflict. The International...
19 Jul Options for a Peace Settlement for Ukraine: Option Paper XI – Reconciliation
...Neighbourliness Committee will be established as an authority and a political mechanism to encourage, support, and coordinate the programs, projects and activities that generate togetherness and common interests between Peru and Ecuador. The Neighbourliness Committee will establish general guidelines for bilateral cooperation, implementation of the border regime, and for the smooth running of the Binational Development Plan for the Border Region.” (Art. 5, italics omitted) The agreement also included direction on the activities the Neighborliness Committee should pursue, as discussed in the following section. By creating a government committee, the...23 Nov Criminal Prosecutions and Another Kind of Precedent
...here, which denies detainee’s Bivens claims for their mistreatment while in detention because no constitutional rights apply to aliens detained abroad, and because even if they did, qualified immunity would apply). My point in discussing these two potential lines of precedent is to recognize something of a catch-22 here and a common remedy. Although civil trials for Guantanamo detainees will go a long way to disestablishing the claim that “war on terror” detainee trials before Military Commissions are (always) necessary, they do so by continuing a trend that already includes...16 Jul New Progressive Quarterly Journal
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas has come out with its first issue. It looks promising, oriented along the lines of the New America Foundation (at least in terms of author affiliations), one of the best things to come out of the think tank world in recent years. There’s substantial foreign policy content here, with a review by Michael Lind of Peter Beinhart’s recent book, Michael Singer extolling the better side of American exceptionalism -“exemplarism” – to ground foreign policy, and Kathryn Roth-Douquet on military service. Jedidiah Purdy‘s “The New Biopolitics”...
08 Aug Libya’s Acceptance of the International Criminal Court’s Jurisdiction: Stakes and Implications
...Libya by the end of 2025. On 15 May 2025, three days after Libya lodged its article 12(3) declaration, he that some lines of inquiry would be completed by the end of the year, with the remaining ones by the end of March 2026. The Prosecutor is independent and retains discretion over whether to initiate investigations. Accordingly, the fact that Libya lodged an article 12(3) declaration with respect to alleged crimes committed until the end of 2027 does not compel the Prosecutor to continue its ongoing investigation or request authorization...09 Feb Mapping the Evolution of States and Empires
The bloggers at Coming Anarchy have put together an informative series of posts about the shifting borders of states and empires. There’s a time-lapse animation of the expansion and contraction of Rome and Byzantium, a series of maps for each of Ethiopia, Poland, Armenia , Persia, and Russia. Also, there’s a series of comparative maps on state borders in modern Europe. Along similar lines (and in light of current events), I would also recommend Catholicgauze’s post on the ethnic geography of Kosovo. Since a picture is worth a thousand words,...