Search: crossing lines
17 Sep In Free Trade Move, Honduras Privatizes Three Cities, Extremely (A New Kind of Company Town?)
...to Mauritius and then to the UK Privy Council (according to this earlier report). This strikes me as the leading edge of a potentially huge development, in which private actors more formally get their own pieces of turf and the lines between sovereign entities further blur. This is by no means to necessarily to celebrate the development (science fiction suggests this dystopian destination). But it does deepen the challenge to received doctrine, and it will require legal innovation to situate the new, private city-state in the world of international law....31 Oct Global FEMA?
...costs away from those who cause them. Compensate folks for building houses on floodplains or sand dunes and they’ll just build them again. These problems would presumably be compounded at the international level. So maybe the endpoint is more in the way of today’s state-federal partnerships than in the way of world-government FEMA. FEMA itself is starting to do some thinking vaguely along these lines; here is a news item from earlier this week about an EU-IOM-Namibia agreement that institutionalizes disaster relief in advance. Other such arrangements will surely follow....
23 Aug International Investment Law Symposium: Is Foreign Direct Investment a Blessing or a Grift?
...Arbitrators preserve the solipsistic thinking of investors, translating special interests into general principles of the regime. Normative conflict is the only possible outcome as each demographic battles over jurisdictional lines. For example, a clever argument recently pursued to support the injection of human rights into the adjudication of panels is the ‘necessity defence’ under customary international law. Do prospective violations of human rights or ecological sustainability amount to a “grave and imminent peril”, permitting states to breach their investment treaty obligations? While this might seem like overreach, some investment tribunals...20 Nov Binding on All States All of the Time
...ironies of the “realism” of political science is that all this reality does not fit their paradigm so they ignore it. This is not to say that all this belief translates into perfect compliance—plainly not. The work of improving law compliance goes on in every legal community. This is also not to say that there is no point in developing empirical methods along the lines Beth indicates. Plainly, well-conducted survey research, for example, can help us to better understand the world we live in. Empirical data can be useful, in...
19 Sep When the World Looks Away: How the Iran–Israel Conflict Diverted Focus from Ukraine
...killing at least ten people and multiple assassination attempts targeting President Zelensky, the recent Iran–Israel conflict stands as a powerful case study in how emerging regional crises can dominate headlines and divert international attention away from Ukraine’s ongoing fight for survival. This split focus provides Moscow with a strategic window to escalate, while Europe and a Trump-led United States juggle diplomatic priorities. The global order, long anchored in deterrence and alliances, is being tested simultaneously on multiple fronts. As tensions in the Middle East have absorbed much of Washington’s and...
07 Jul Customary International Law Symposium: Making Sense of Law as Practice (Or: Why Custom Doesn’t Crystallize)
...“rulebook,” I would suggest that it does require shared parameters along the lines I sketched above. Further, I agree with Monica that conduct or positions that exceed existing CIL are “legally cognizable” (1521) and have the potential to affect the content of CIL (1494). However, although such positions are very much part of the process that shapes CIL, they are not CIL, as Monica appears to suggest (1511). In my view, it is important to maintain a distinction, and to be able to assert that such conduct or argumentation is...
18 Aug Forced Sterilisation and Transformative Reparations: The Inter‑American Court’s Seminal Judgment in Ramos Durand et al. v. Peru
...Indigenous and rural women, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR) created in June 2001 did not incorporate forced sterilisation among the core violations it investigated. This despite the possibility of addressing it under categories such as torture or other serious injuries. That omission carried into the design of Peru’s Integral Reparations Plan (PIR) in 2005, which followed the CVR’s lines and consequently excluded survivors of forced sterilisation from the programme and its Victims’ Unified Registry (RUV). Later amendments in 2021 broadened categories by referring to “sexual violence in its various...
20 Jan Q&A: The Times and Temporalities of Human Rights
...by showing up the concurrent timelines at play (still enduring one trauma as the next begins), demonstrating the snares that law sets for itself (through, for example, not anticipating its own failure or ‘stuckness’), and the predictable outcomes of the timelines law and policy establish. NM: I was struck, in reading the collection, by the pervasive presence of temporality in human rights law, in its promises and aspirations and also in its fault lines and limitations – from the idea of progressive evolutive interpretation in the ‘living instrument’ doctrine of...08 Jan Liberia’s TRC Begins Work
The beginning of Charles Taylor’s trial before the Special Court for Sierra Leone is obviously big news, and those who are interested in the trial should check out the live-blogging and analysis here. But Taylor’s trial should not overshadow an equally important event related to the civil war in Liberia — the launch of Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: The commission was established along similar lines to South Africa’s post-apartheid body. Since 2003, Liberia has inched forward, helped by the presence of thousands of peacekeeping troops. The conflict saw the...03 Feb Sorting through the Torture Debate: Lederman in a Split Decision
...discretion here. If the Administration has a policy to treat detainees “humanely” but nonetheless prisoners are not being treated “humanely” as well as (possibly) in violation of certain laws, the Administration is responsible for not preventing these abuses, even if they were not technically illegal. In order for the Administration to use coercive interrogations skirting the lines of legality, they must demonstrate the judgment and the credibility that they would wield such power judiciously. Their record thus far is not very reassuring, to say the least. No one in the...