Search: crossing lines
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...
17 Dec The Trump Administration’s Subversion of the State Department’s Human Rights Reporting (Part 2)
...issues were all absent or greatly reduced this year. Across the 2024 country reports, these once-standard topics were essentially collapsed into a few lines under the general “Security of the Person” heading and stripped of any real analysis. The gutting of these central categories of rights violations is of course deeply concerning—but even more troubling are the issues the Trump administration has chosen to elevate instead. Second, the focus has shifted to political priorities of the Trump administration, such as violence against white Afrikaners in South Africa and antisemitism. One...
01 Mar Ecofeminism in Public International Law
...wealth. Sustainable development, thus, failed to question the core presumptions of the ‘dominant development model’. It was only in 1995, at the 4th United Nations Conference in Beijing that ‘women and environment’ were identified and given due importance as stakeholders in the contemporary world. International treaties on the lines of the Johannesburg Declaration imbibed gender issues as integral parts of all facets of Agenda 21, encouraging nation-states to first identify, then categorize and eventually resolve issues relating to women and the environment. The decades since have seen slow but consistent...
19 Dec Digital Accountability Symposium: Intersectionality and International Criminal Investigations in a Digital Age
...to investigations will help avoid many of the possible pitfalls that may accompany the use of technology in international criminal investigations. An intersectional investigative approach is one that integrates analysis of how location, gender and wealth, for example, affect an ethnic, racial, national or other group’s access to technology. I argue that such an approach will facilitate a more just criminal justice approach by highlighting possible fault lines in the use of particular forms of evidence in investigative approaches. Investigative strategies should counter a lack of access to justice due...13 Jun Should There Be an International Treaty on Cyberwarfare?
...self-defense. The prospect that one State may assume a cyberattack falls below a use of force or armed attack threshold while the victim State perceives it as above those lines is not a happy one — it could lead to an unintended escalation of an incident into a larger armed conflict. Add to this the possibility that a victim State may respond by attacking an innocent third State (or non-State actor) because it holds the mistaken belief (on its own or via a successful false flag operation) that the innocent...22 Jul WWJRD (What Would Justice Roberts Do) with International Law?
...case law as the opinion makes them out to be. They are instead the subject of vigorous debate and disagreement.The only case I could find in which Judge Roberts signed onto an opinion that enforced international law was in Robertson v. American Airlines . In that case, the Court of Appeals (in an opinion again authored by another member of the panel) held that the two-year statute of limitations provided by international law applied to the claim of the litigant rather than the more generous three-year rule that generally governs...
23 Oct The Special Criminal Court Must Fill the Justice Gap Left by the ICC in Central African Republic
[Chuka Arinze-Onyia is a practicing criminal defense lawyer with an avid interest in international justice issues. He authored this article during a recent stint as an International Justice in Africa Fellow with Amnesty International.] On 16 December 2022, the ICC Prosecutor announced that his office had concluded the investigation phase of its work in Central African Republic (CAR) and would not pursue new lines of inquiry within the country. The immediate consequence of this decision is that until the ordinary national courts develop the capacity to dispense justice for crimes...