Search: crossing lines

...carefully argued piece descends into complete gibberish when it tries to explain how “international law” can be a tool for the United States to constrain and manage China’s activities in the South China Sea. And if Beijing tried to extract economic gains from contested regions [in the South China Sea], Washington could facilitate a process along the lines of the proportional punishment strategy it helped make part of the World Trade Organization: let the Permanent Court of Arbitration, in The Hague, determine the gains of China’s illegal actions, place a...

...which of the two should carry greater weight. This question becomes particularly complex in protracted conflicts characterized by recurring hostilities. In such contexts, immediacy, as a backward-looking concept tied to a prior armed attack, may risk transforming a lawful act of self-defense into an unlawful armed reprisal. Conversely, imminence, as a forward-looking notion, may be used to justify anticipatory self-defense in the face of a perceived impending threat. The cyclical nature of violence in some conflicts—marked by intermittent pauses between escalations—can blur the lines between reprisal, anticipatory self-defense, and lawful...

...the authors fail to specify the lines between the bifurcated categories with adequate precision. As I have written elsewhere, treaties regulate three types of relationships: horizontal relations between states; vertical relations between states and private parties; and transnational relations between private parties that cross national boundaries. See David Sloss, Treaty Enforcement in Domestic Courts: A Comparative Analysis, in THE ROLE OF DOMESTIC COURTS IN TREATY ENFORCEMENT: A COMPARATIVE STUDY (Sloss ed., 2009). US courts never had a major role in enforcing horizontal treaty provisions. From the Founding until World War...

...international personality “disappears” under the ICC institutional veil. This theory is also connected with the claim that the ICC’s “statutory framework” should be applied “as a whole” to Sudan (para. 45 of the 2009 decision) and it definitely has effects on the primary obligation. In the context of international responsibility, the idea that member states act as quasi-organs is used to escape courts’ jurisdiction. As mentioned by Jordan (p. 90), the ECtHR would be lacking jurisdiction ratione personae (on the lines of the Behrami and Saramati case). All in all,...

...invasion of Iraq was illegal: In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: “I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.” President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq – also the British government’s publicly stated view – or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law. But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence...

...red lines. Europe might not be an effective counter-weight, given the disdain of the Trump Administration for its former close allies across the Atlantic. However the format of the talks develops, any mediation effort would in the end need to be backed up by a Contact Group of Supporting States. In addition to the US, UK, Germany, France and Italy, this might include traditional supporters of mediation like Norway, Sweden, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Switzerland, and states closer to the Russian Federation, perhaps like Belarus, China, India, South...

...as many proposals as possible, but preference will be given to scholars who did not present last year and to works that have not yet been accepted for publication. We also workshop early stage projects. If you are interested in presenting on an early stage project, please let us know the working title and a few lines about the idea you are pursuing. Finally, if you are willing to be a commentator, please let us know. UN Audiovisual Library The Codification Division of the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs...

...Palestinians can never obtain real or full self-determination)  Eghbariah argues that the Nakba regime maintains the structure of oppressive fragmentation by developing a variety of legal constraints preventing refugees from returning to their lands or reuniting with family members with a different legal status (p.986).  This is reflected in several heartbreaking scenes that litter the last few episodes of the series, such as Masoud’s attempts to cross the armistice lines to get some oranges from their old farms or when Rushdi sneaks into 1948 lands to search for his mother. ...

...by way of obliterating the element of time that a reboot of international scholarship was made possible, creating new avenues for academic debate and rerailing intellectual conversations along lines that we somewhat keep following today. But even when the abstract functioning of disciplinary discourse is exposed, its structural bias remains unexplained. For precisely because it is indeterminate and theoretically empowers no-one, international law is also invariably used to disempower the already disempowered. Here, almost on a second thought, the contextuality of time reappears, echo of a broader post-structural turn which...

...among diverse normative communities. Global administrative law emphasizes that much modern global governance occurs not in high-profile diplomatic conferences or treaty negotiations, but in less visible “global administrative spaces.” Global administrative law urges that these administrative and regulatory processes be reformed along lines that advance administrative law values, such as transparency, consultation, participation, reasoned decision making, and review. Moreover, global administrative law focuses the accountability and legitimacy of global administrative practices, important dimensions of global governance that GLP does not analyze in detail. To date, only a handful of scholars...

...arrangement would be particularly useful given the part-domestic and part-international nature of any likely agreement. It would offer the opportunity of dealing with disputes related to the domestic aspects of the agreement first in a domestic setting (utilising both political and judicial dispute settlement mechanisms) before referring any unresolved matters to an international body. Such an international body could, in parallel, deal with any disputes arising from the international aspects of the agreement. Alternatively, one could consider a hybrid body, for example along the lines of the Joint Supervisory Body...

It’s a happy new year (of sorts) for U.S. Human Rights Groups concerned about the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Darfur. For the last several years, groups such as the Save Darfur Coalition have pushed state and local governments to divest from companies that invest or do business with Sudan. Their efforts have produced some impressive results –since 2005, 22 U.S. states have divested their assets from Sudan, either along the lines recommended by the grassroots Sudan Divestment Task Force, or through some other model (the movement also has a private...