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Search: crossing lines

29 Jun

...implement a compulsory license is shared. This is the underlying principle of the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in Relation to Access to Medicines (2008), as affirmed by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, Paul Hunt, who drafted these guidelines (see here, p.12). This principle is enshrined under Articles 7 and 8 of the TRIPS Agreement, which recognise the need for states to take appropriate measures against practices that constitute an abuse of intellectual property rights or adversely affect technology transfer. States have various policy tools...
29.06.23 | |

20 Aug

...measures aimed at granting adequate “assistance in relocating protected witnesses abroad and ensuring their protection [and] exchange of information between authorities responsible for witness protection programmes” (ibidem). When a state implements judicial assistance mechanisms, its obligation to guarantee adequate protection of witnesses is extended across the state’s boundary lines, with a resulting surveillance obligation on the activity of the state requested of the assistance. This aspect should be considered by the requesting state when deciding to have recourse to judicial assistance both when a protected witness has to be heard...
20.08.13 | |

31 Jul

...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...
31.07.08 | |

18 Mar

...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...
18.03.26 | and |

19 Jul

...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...
19.07.22 | |

23 Nov

...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...
23.11.09 | |

16 Jul

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”...
16.07.06 | |

08 Aug

...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...
08.08.25 | and |

09 Feb

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,...
09.02.08 | |

29 Mar

...forms of noncompliance that may be beneficial, but I do not consider them at length. Professor Pauwelyn first claims that I go “too far by underestimating the flexibilities and exit options that exist within the system of international law.” What I describe as noncompliance, he sees as “flexibilities and exit options perfectly permitted and accepted within international law.” I wish more people thought along those lines, and I wish it were that international law were more like what Professor Pauwelyn describes. Unfortunately, international law and international legal scholars appear to...
29.03.07 | |

07 Nov

...to attack non-state actors in cases of unwillingness or inability of the host State, but rather requested each State to deal with the threats they encountered inside their own borders. In fact, this understanding of a limited set of options available to deal with rebel forces acting across national lines is precisely the legal discussion at the heart of the Mexican and American positions during the 1916 Punitive Expedition, and exactly the reason why I find its inclusion on Deeks’ chart so surprising. But more on this in Part II....
07.11.18 | |

16 Nov

...The “shared understandings” of statehood are morphing so as to shrink the spaces of sovereign insulation. To paraphrase Wendt, sovereignty is what states make of it, and states’ identity as such has come to comprehend a downsized version. There are lots of ways in which international law is degrading sovereignty. I think it’s possible now to imagine the internal enforcement of international law along the lines of the Modern State Conception — not all advocates of international law “tend to let the conversation drop at this point.” (276). The construction...
16.11.11 | |