Search: crossing lines

...control of independent sovereign nations. They ask states to delegate lawmaking, law enforcement, or adjudication authority to bureaucracies, such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, or the World Trade Organization, that operate along undemocratic lines and remain unaccountable to any nation. These efforts at global governance create tension with American constitutional controls on state power…. Many scholars of international law argue that globalization’s demands justify abnormal powers for the federal government. Treaties on global warming or the environment, for example, should have a reach beyond the Constitution’s...

...lines proposed by the working group, it will only serve to undercut the legitimacy of international law. Indeed, given the current nature of state practice with respect to the use of force and the lack of compliance with the UN Charter framework, I am led to the conclusion that aggression cannot be defined as a crime under international law at this time. But this should not be too troubling. The Security Council continues to have the authority under Article 39 to find that a state has committed an act of...

...the primary motivations for state compliance with international law: reciprocity. UPDATE: There is an informative article in the New York Times Magazine addressing the difficulty of where to draw the line when soldiers are on the ground facing threatening circumstances. It addresses the question of “the line that separates nonlethal force that is justified – and sometimes very painful – from nonlethal force that is criminal.” Not directly relevant to enemy detention, but underscores the need to draw lines between what is criminal mistreatment and what is not. Read it....

...his Department firmly believes themselves to be covered by the Act, a source tells me outgoing Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes was not aware of this until a few short months ago). Smith-Mundt has shaped the content and methods of communications from State and Defense through institutionalized firewalls created along artificial lines, fostering a bureaucratic culture of discrimination that hampers America’s ability to participate in the modern struggle over ideas and managing perceptions. The rest of the post provides a history of Smith-Mundt and how it affects...

...ideological lines, thereby delegitimizing customary rules and increasing fragmentation. Thus, far from being an unqualified boon to benevolent legal ordering, codification can replicate, magnify, or alter power dynamics present in forming bare customary law. Indeed, the fragmentation of customary law that can result from codification actually prevents a unified understanding of customary law from emerging — the exact opposite of codification’s ostensible purpose. This Article uses the Capture Thesis to explain important developments in customary international law, including the outlawing of the slave trade in the nineteenth century, the rise...

...10. US$75,000 for other government losses on the Central Front; 11. US$125,000 for looting of property from the Relief Society of Tigray; 12. US$150,000 for damage in Adi Goshu; 13. US$625,000 for shelling damage in Sheraro; 14. US$65,000 for damage caused by the attack on the Mekele airport; 15. US$4,000,000 for profits lost by Ethiopian Airlines; 16. US$1,703,020 for failing to provide Ethiopian Airlines access to its bank accounts at the Bank of Eritrea; and 17. US$7,500,000 for reconstruction and assistance to internally displacedpersons. C. As determined at the liability...

...posit a variety of false conflicts along these lines: One type of false conflict might latch onto the international law character of the norm at issue, particularly if it is a jus cogens norm—say, the prohibition on torture—to argue that by force of international law that norm applies everywhere, and therefore necessarily presents a false conflict of laws. A weakness with this type of false conflict argument is that while jus cogens clearly contain prohibitions on certain violations of international law, they do not clearly contain private rights of action...

...language from ‘shall’ to ‘may’ was necessary—in fact, it could be a deal breaker. The change would permit States that do not recognize the customary nature of universal jurisdiction for crimes under the Convention to nevertheless join (see debates in the UN General Assembly Sixth (Legal) Committee here, here, and here). Ultimately, ‘shall’ was retained—and therefore so too was the substantive obligation. Reading Between the (Red) Lines Ostensibly, these are two examples of compromise with the same goal—seeking the greatest number of State Parties possible. However, the context in which...

...which while not embedded in the wording of the provision itself, still constitute part of its essence. The Rome Statute provision was drafted along the lines of article 91 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). The latter, echoing a strong jurisprudence and treaty tradition stipulates and favours the notion that there must be a genuine link between the flag state and the vessel. This genuine link requirement is critical. While in some instances judicial bodies may have appeared reluctant to assert it, the reason was...

...Declaration means that Israel and Palestine are prepared to agree along the lines of the Road Map and Oslo, then there is cause for hope. I’ll close with a point about timing, because the 2008 deadline gives me pause. Deadlines are great if you are part way to a deal; apparently the imposition of a deadline was key to the Good Friday agreement. But deadlines can be obstacles, particularly if they are set early on before much has been agreed on and anyone has a sense as to how long...

...expressly considering the survivors’ stance. In establishing the elements of the crime of other inhumane acts, the Appeals Chamber noted that being labelled a “forced wife” by perpetrators subjected survivors to mental trauma (para 193), but did not contemplate any long-term consequences of their judicial determination to the same effect. Along similar lines, the ICC found the “imposition, regardless of the will of the victim, of duties that are associated with marriage, as well as of a social status of the perpetrator’s ‘wife’” determinative (Ongwen CoC para 93), rather than...

A while back, I wrote an article on how states use the rhetoric of international law (specifically self-determination) as part of their broader foreign policy initiatives. Li Hong, the Secretary-General of China’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, has an op-ed in today’s China Daily that embeds law-talk (in this case the international law of outer space and multilateralism more generally) in an essay that (I think) is really trying to send a signal about the trend lines of China and the U.S. as space-faring nations. He starts by invoking international...