Search: crossing lines
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...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...
17 Oct A Visible College, 2.0: Israel, Hamas, and the International Legal Community
...residents—as lawful self-defence against an armed attack, provided for in Article 51 of the UN Charter and long established as a rule of customary international law. Blogposts have been written, Tweets have been published, and I suspect, a few insults have been exchanged. Debate and disagreement are vital components of any academic discipline. As academics, we customarily position our own work in relation to the fault lines in existing scholarly debate, and we regularly ask our students to familiarise themselves with, and write about, key controversies in the subject area....
06 May Options for a Peace Settlement for Ukraine: Option Paper III – Weapons of Mass Destruction
...hostilities. The Role of this Issue in the Negotiations The Russian Federation has made several statements in various fora that Ukraine is attempting to obtain weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, nuclear) to be used against the Russian Federation and others (e.g. here, here and here). These allegations may be an aspect of the current negotiations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine that must be addressed to the satisfaction of both parties. There have been statements along the lines that the Russian Federation’s allegations are a “disinformation campaign”, the intention...12 Jul Charnovitz on NGOs
...legal scene. Continuity is the message. To the extent that there has been recent change, it is not in the way of a revolution but rather of a “reformation” – “a return to an earlier doctrine so as to clear away errors, such as the excessive state-centricity of positivist orthodoxy.” The piece makes the best case that can be made along those lines. It is rich in its documentation of the early and mid-twentieth century literature on NGOs (including in the first volume of the AJIL itself), for which purposes...30 Nov The Corrosive Risks of Lawless Leadership
...civilized. That was my duty as their leader . . . War gives the appearance of condoning almost everything, but men must live with their actions for a long time afterward. A leader has to help them understand that there are lines they must not cross. He is their link to normalcy, to order, to humanity. If the leader loses his own sense of propriety or shrinks from his duty, anything will be allowed . . . War is, at its very core, the absence of order; and the absence...15 Dec The Noble Lie and International Politics
...the answer is something along the lines of the limitations that law has to compel or induce states on issues of critical national importance. But, why would this issue, which is certainly not controversial to or disputed by most historians, constitute a sufficiently important issue that Turkey would be willing to jeopardize its EU accession talks? I’m reminded of the noble lie in Plato’s Republic, in which it is acknowledged that all states have their origins in brutality and blood, and therefore all states create national myths about their foundings...27 Jul R2P RIP? Let’s Hope Not
...States, it cuts across partisan lines and unites foreign policy idealists, liberals and conservatives, left and right. The Hoover Institution’s Tod Lindberg, for example, has joined forces for many years with such foreign policy liberals as Lee Feinstein and others to craft and advocate a US foreign policy supportive of the concept. Precisely because I am extremely supportive of R2P, I have always been concerned about the evolution of R2P as a legal concept at the United Nations because, in diplomatic developments there, it seemed to take steps backwards from...14 Apr Our Tax Dollars at Work
...order to drain the ink supply in company fax machines, inundating computers with e-mails causing them to crash, and tying up company phone lines to prevent legitimate calls. We can only pray that al-Qaida hasn’t obtained a copy of the Assessment. Should it ever decide to take a page from the eco-terrorists’ playbook — repurposing the cellphones it now knows we’re monitoring to prank call the Pentagon, for example — the damage to our national security could be incalculable. Keep up the good work, DHS! A weary nation thanks you...26 Jan The Constitutional Conflict in Turkey: Is There Still an Effective Remedy for Human Rights Violations?
...a Constitutional Court what its scope of competency is. If lower courts are able to challenge the binding nature of the Constitutional Court’s decision – as happened in the Istanbul courts in January – a dangerous level of uncertainty runs throughout the legal system without any clear lines of legal authority. It means that no person may rely on a final judicial decision establishing what the law is in any domain regulated by law. The Turkish legal system in all its tenets, from criminal, civil, administrative and commercial law, becomes...