Search: crossing lines
22 Oct The Golden Rule of Enemy Detention
...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....20 Mar A Decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind
...of international lawmaking in trade and its stagnation in human rights as a question of substance rather than as a question of process. It turns out, Hathaway tells us, that this gap reflects the fact that the process by which international law is made in the trade area is more likely to be by congressional executive agreement (i.e., NAFTA) while the process by which international law is made in the human rights area is exclusively by treaty (i.e., the Genocide Convention). Along the lines of Martin Lederman and David Golove...10 Jan Saving the UN from Itself (and Others)
...don’t really question the immediate ends of UN programs or the ultimate ends of the UN itself but rather how these policies are implemented. I take Julian’s criticisms to be largely along these lines. The other form of criticism– the critique of ends– has had a fairly loud voice (though not necessarily broad following) in recent US politics. These attacks are usually not aimed at the immediate ends of UN policies (say, separating warring factions in Country X) but rather at a sense that the real aim of the UN...
11 Nov Raising the Bar: Will Courts Up Their Game on Fair Trial Rights After Semenya and RFC Seraing?
...addressed the issue of immunity for international organizations vs. an individual’s right of access to justice. The HRC reiterated that organizations must provide adequate alternative remedies along the lines of Waite and Kennedy, yet stopped short of assessing whether the ADB Administrative Tribunal genuinely met the requirements of Article 14 of the ICCPR. More controversially, the HRC implicitly accepted that disputes involving international civil servants may be subject to a lower standard of protection. This reasoning, however, appears to contradict the human rights framework set out in the ICESCR. General...04 Feb ICJ Sets Black Sea Maritime Boundary Between Romania and Ukraine; Resolves Significant Oil and Natural Gas Claims
The ICJ has issued a judgment in the case Maritime Delimitation in the Black Sea (Romania v. Ukraine). At first glance the issue may seem relatively dry: whether Serpents’ Island in the Black Sea is an inhabited island or just a rocky outcropping. But the answer to this question affects maritime delimitation lines, which in turn resolves which country has the right to exploit oil and natural gas deposits found near Serpents’ Island, which may total about 100 billion cubic meters of natural gas and 100 million metric tons of...13 Sep Forced Relationships: Prosecutorial Discretion as a Pathway to Survivor-Centric Justice
...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...03 Aug Space Cadets… (International Legal Rhetoric Edition)
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...10 Sep Samuel Moyn on the History of Human Rights and the Human Rights Movement
...the dissidents of Eastern Europe. These strategic idealists in the US were up against, well, Kissinger (who later got religion, to judge by a couple of lines in one of his memoir volumes, in which he acknowledged that he had underestimated the power of legitimacy in foreign relations, meaning that itsy-bitsy line in the Helsinki accord). I got involved directly in field missions for Americas Watch in 1983, but it was clear that the reason they had resonance was because of Jeri Laber’s pathbreaking work for Helsinki Watch in Europe....28 Jan Guest Post: Colangelo–Kiobel and Conflicts of Law
...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...