Search: crossing lines
19 Jul Guest Post: Israeli Committee Declares End to West Bank Occupation
...courts and the rest of the world for decades, namely that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is temporary and that measures designating Palestinian land and natural resources for Israeli use are motivated by security concerns. Here are some conclusions by the committee that I wholeheartedly endorse: 1. The so-called “unauthorized” outposts, built without the proper building permits and zoning plans, were as a matter of fact approved and funded by the State of Israel, which provided military protection, installed water and electricity lines, built access roads and funded public...18 Jul Was the Hamdan Court Reading Rick Pildes?
...the same result if we had a Democrat Congress? The Harvard piece, along with a 2004 essay with Sam Issacharoff, also maps well onto Hamdan in extracting a process-based, institutionally-focused tradition in wartime decisionmaking from the Court. The Court has threaded the poles of rights-based idelaism on the one hand and deference to executive unilateralism on the other, looking instead for the reassurance of bilateral agreement between the political branches. The Youngstown story is of course well known along these lines. Less familiar is Pildes’ retelling of Milligan and Korematsu....
03 Nov Genocide at The Hague: A Transitional Justice Reckoning?
...from strategic state interests and geopolitical alignments. For example, as Jacobs observes, key Western actors supporting Ukraine’s case against Russia, like Germany and the US have been notably less vocal about Gaza at the ICJ. In contrast, while South Africa and Nicaragua have played visible roles in the Gaza litigation, their engagement with Ukraine’s case has been muted, neither appears to have intervened formally. Such inconsistencies reinforce the perception that legal accountability is applied selectively along political lines. The ICJ is not the UN General Assembly: its authority rests on...
24 May Policy Recommendations to Meaningfully Mitigate Civilian Harm in Military Operations: A View from the Netherlands (Part I)
...investigation and response processes, and should be described in the Article-100 Letters (a constitutional requirement to inform Parliament about the deployment of Dutch military personnel, after which a Parliamentary debate occurs). By outlining these parameters prior to agreeing to participate within a coalition context, participating States agree on baselines of how they understand CHMR efforts prior to military engagement and where red lines are drawn. These standards can reflect access to intelligence and information prior to targeting missions and should reflect CHMR throughout the joint targeting cycle. States should also...
23 May Punishing Atrocities Symposium: Exploring Joint Criminal Enterprise
...always clearly distinguished. One question concerns the lines between guilt and innocence. Does the law improperly convict people for harms for which they are not, in fact culpable? The other question concerns the grading of culpability. Does the law fail to adequately differentiate degrees of guilt by, for example, treating all JCE members as guilty of the same crimes despite significant differences in their roles and respective contributions? I will start with the first. When the I teach the Tadić case—in which the ICTY Appeals Chamber first announced its...
07 Aug Writing in International Law and Cultural Barriers (Part II)
...issues (see, eg, AsianJIL guidelines). We do have, however, some suggestions on how those involved in teaching, writing and publishing can cooperate towards filling in cultural communication gaps. First, we believe that it is important that authors and publishers understand the problem needs to be addressed through a two-way street approach. It should not be for authors to do all the heavy-lifting of having to adapt to different writing styles, nor should this mean that authors should not be concerned with writing and communicating well. Authors should retain agency over...17 Sep IL/IR Symposium: Comment on Helfer
...more or less, with evidence from “escape” studies that differentiates the conduct of stable democracies from autocracies – but would also suggest that these and other fault lines emerge first during treaty design. Third, and finally, a more general word about the call for future research. This is typically one of the most useful functions of a survey chapter, if done astutely, and Larry’s suggestions – reflected in his blog post – do not disappoint. While I agree with him about the kind of questions that should be addressed, I’d...17 Sep IL/IR Symposium: Flexibility in International Agreements
...unanticipated interaction or substitution effects among formal and informal flexibility mechanisms. These conclusions suggest four lines of inquiry that scholars might pursue in future studies. First, in addition to analyzing individual flexibility mechanisms, scholars should give greater attention to the relationship among different flexibility tools. Barbara Koremenos’ 2005 article, Contracting Around International Uncertainty, is a pioneer in this regard. Future studies might consider whether other flexibility tools are complements or substitutes. This research would be especially welcome for issue areas, such as environment and security, for which flexibility tools have...20 Aug Emerging Voices: The Joint Obligation to Protect Witnesses in the Fight against Transnational Organized Crime
...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...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...