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....
15 May EU Corporate Human Rights Due Diligence Obligations: From Means to Results
...least adequately mitigate them. This makes it clear that duty of vigilance cannot be fulfilled by a tick box exercise. Along these lines, Article 9 requires that the corporation sets a complaint mechanism for legitimate concerns regarding the adverse human rights impacts of the corporation’s activities. As for the duty of care counterpart of HRDD in the Commission’s Proposal, concerns have been raised on the nature of the obligation it establishes. Indeed, national law considers duties of care as obligations of means/best efforts: if the defendant proves that they were...23 Jun New Rules for Cyberwar?
...the U.S. can defend itself by blocking cyber intrusions and taking down servers in another country. And, as in cases of mortar or missile attacks, the U.S. has the right to pursue attackers across national boundaries — even if those are virtual network lines. Under the new Pentagon guidelines, it would be unacceptable to deliberately route a cyberattack through another country if that nation has not given permission — much like U.S. fighter jets need permission to fly through another nation’s airspace. Uri Friedman over at the Atlantic Wire distills...
11 Dec Symposium on Forensic and Counter-Forensic Approaches to International Law: Private Investigators, Public Accountability – Digital Forensics and the Politics of Evidence in International Crimes
...for selective curation of evidence, and, importantly, the vulnerability to weaponization and politicization of sensitive data. In this short post, I critically examine these risks and argue that the current lack of accountability structures beyond voluntary codes of conduct for private actors creates legal and ethical fault lines. As a potential solution, I propose a shift in international legal thinking: rather than relying on formal legal personality, responsibility should be based on an actor’s practical engagement in justice processes. The Politics of Evidence in International Conflicts Since these armed attacks...09 Oct Omit Needless Words
...paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts…. Many expressions in common use violate this principle…. In especial the expression “the fact that” should be revised out of every sentence in which it occurs. So how do the top law journals perform under the microscope of William Strunk and E.B. White? In the countless hours of drafting and editing, do the top scholars and top student editors adhere to this elementary principle of composition? The results...31 Mar HILJ Online Symposium: On the Love of Hybrids and Technicalities
...rights protection, 27-30). We part our ways – although perhaps more in terms of reasoning than the conclusion (p 43) – when the article makes an argument for interdependence of investor’s and State’s rights, with the first claim against the respondent State (whoever of the two it might be brought by) precluding the second one, along the lines of the ICSID Convention (pp 43-9). The first objection is that this argument cannot be based on the principle underlying the rule of the ICSID Convention: article 27(1) does not waive or...
30 Mar International Cyber Law Strategy for the UN Global Mechanism
...available for international law matters, choosing how to spend scarce negotiating capital becomes especially critical. This post outlines four ways states could structure their engagement with international law within the Global Mechanism. From Applicability to Practice The predecessors of the Global Mechanism, the UN Groups of Governmental Experts (operating between 2012–2021) and the Open-Ended Working Groups (2019–2025), approached international law largely at an abstract level. Their deliberations focused on whether existing law applies in the cyber context and whether new law is required to govern this domain. While meaningful progress...