Search: crossing lines
09 Nov I Wasn’t Paying Attention When the Wall Came Down
...away again. It was very hard for me to believe that this was actually real and tangible, and not something so fragile that a little puff could bring the house of cards down. (I’m not sure if Philip Alston remembers, but we had a conversation on almost exactly those lines, at a human rights conference organized by Philip and Henry Steiner, with me as administrative assistant, on Crete earlier that summer, sitting out on the beach of a Cretan monastery and positively slathered with sunblock.) So I wish I had...26 Jun YJIL Symposium: Human Rights and Climate Change Adaptation at the international Level
...apartheid, which is most often associated with an institutionalized legal regime of separating the races for the purpose of systematic oppression. For example, how do discussions of the climate change legal regime and the disparate impacts along geographic and gender lines relate to traditional uses and understandings of the term apartheid? The bulk of the authors’ text focuses on approaching the problem of climate change adaptation from a human rights perspective, highlighting national initiatives and touching on possible international ones. The issue of climate change refugees provides an excellent case...13 Jun What Comes Next?
...of criminal justice in the Military Commissions Act. Under the majority’s opinion, Congress can create procedures governing review; Congress can funnel the cases to a new court to conduct that review; Congress can define burdens of proof; and Congress can define the categories of people who are detainable. Indeed, I’ll argue in a later post that the majority essentially invites Congress to do so—albeit in a more thoughtful way than the 15 lines of statutory text which constitute the sum total of congressional participation on this question to date. Will...05 Aug Don’t Blame Us, the United Nations Made Us Do It
...Act. But if the Coast Guard delegates its responsibility for traffic separation schemes to the International Maritime Organization, and if we accept this delegation as relieving the Coast Guard of any responsibility for them, no such recourse is available. The International Maritime Organization is not subject to the Administrative Procedure Act or the ESA…. “[W]hen an agency delegates power to outside parties, lines of accountability may blur, undermining an important democratic check on government decision-making.” Appellees point to no evidence showing that Congress intended to undermine the ability of injured...05 Aug Medellin: Did Texas Cut a Deal With Mexico?
...by state law quirks that deprive Governor Rick Perry of the final say. On the other side, for all its bluster along the lines of “we didn’t sign no treaty,” Texas understands that the Avena controversy hasn’t been good for the state’s global image. So this represents the putative compromise. A slender reed of evidence for a deal: the Mexican government is MIA in all the press reports on Medellin’s impending execution. It appears not to be complaining publicly about the clear violation an IL obligation. If there were some...
06 Feb The ‘Negotiating Text’ of the new WHO Treaty on Pandemic Preparedness and Response: An Initial Analysis and Underexamined Points of Concern
...Influenza and in domestic public health guidelines (p.70) on the response to infectious disease outbreaks. The draft provisions of the Negotiating Treaty examined in the following reflect the main components of the biomedical approach and its envisaged domestic and international institutions. The Envisaged Global Bio-surveillance System The Negotiating Text foresees the building of a global bio-surveillance system with international (WHO) and domestic components. In short, the draft treaty envisages that each state builds up laboratory capacities that then work together as a global network through which they can identify emerging...25 Mar Posner and Sykes Book Symposium: Comment by Emilie Hafner-Burton and David Victor
...the law and economics movement, Posner and Sykes evaluate law mainly as an instrument of economic policy. For them, the central questions turn on economic efficiency and on whether states see practical, sustained benefits from participation in international legal arrangements. This approach helps explain why this work will be easy for scholars from political economy and the so-called “rationalist” schools of political science to understand and accept. The economic approach that Posner and Sykes elegantly describe also puts intellectual battle lines into sharp relief. For scholars in law schools and...
08 Aug Symposium on Unbroken Bond: Tracing the Ties Between African and Palestinian Anti-Colonial Struggles – The Application of International Law to Legitimise Settler Colonialism and Land Grabbing in Zimbabwe and Palestine: An Analysis of the Van Pezold and Ben Sourik Decisions
...legacy of this problematic philosophy is echoed in the contemporary land grabbing practices in Palestine and, indeed, within international law frameworks as well. Hidden between the lines in the Van Pezold and Beit Sourik decisions is an implicit assumption that international law and its application will continue serving post-colonial imperial capitalist interests simply because it (international law) is drafted in a manner which does not account for colonial history. International law is prospective in nature and the world must not repeat the injustices of colonialism, yet, what about colonialism’s afterlives? ...
18 Aug States of Justice Symposium: Politicised Referrals are Still Referrals Nonetheless
...that will mitigate the use of international criminal justice for political and security ends; and not blur the lines between peace and justice (Werle and Zimmermann 2019, 3). The idea that international justice is “inherently political” (Ba 2020, 65) holds true for the instances highlighted by Ba in the book. Similarly, bringing perpetrators of gross human rights violations to account; providing victims of international crimes with a platform to detail their violation; and providing reparations for victims is also justice. In conclusion, Russian novelist and philosopher Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes: “When...22 Jul Does the U.S. Need a Declaration of War on Al-Qaida?
...world we live in, not the world we wish we lived in. Such rules should not provide greater protection than we would provide to American citizens held as enemy combatants in this conflict; and they must assure that court proceedings are not permitted to interfere with the mission of our armed forces. In other words, soldiers fighting the war on terror, for example, should not be required to leave the front lines to testify as witnesses in habeas hearings. Affidavits prepared after battlefield activities have ceased should be enough. And,...