Search: extraterritorial sanctions

...is the most obvious: pursuing criminal prosecutions or civil tort suits against contractors who commit abuses. With regard to criminal prosecution, our current system of enforcement is seriously flawed in a number of respects. To begin with, there are gaps in the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA), the primary law that gives U.S. courts the power to try contractors when they are accused of committing serious abuses. That statute does not clearly govern contractors who work for agencies other than the Defense Department, such as the State Department contractors involved...

[Tomas Hamilton is an Assistant Professor in International Criminal Law at the University of Amsterdam. Marina Aksenova is an Assistant Professor in International and Comparative Criminal Law at IE University in Madrid.] In the ongoing civil suits in Mexico v Smith & Wesson & others and Mexico v Diamondback Shooting Sports Inc. et al, the Mexican government has brought claims against US gun manufacturers in Massachusetts and gun dealers in Arizona for extraterritorial harms suffered by the Mexican State in the context of cartel violence. The US district court judge...

...States.” The most important consequence of pure sovereignty is that it prohibits states from engaging in extraterritorial cyber-espionage. The Tallinn Manual 2.0 claims that because international law does not regulate such espionage in the physical realm, it does not regulate it in the cyber one. Most scholars take the same position. Russell Buchan and I, however, have argued precisely the opposite — that international law prohibits extraterritorial espionage in both the physical and cyber realms. We now have 55 more states that agree with us. The African Union’s communique is...

...acquiesce lightly to the extraterritorial jurisdiction of Israeli military and civilian courts in the West Bank. Against the backdrop of the current Israeli administration’s intention to annex large swathes of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the de facto exercise of Israel’s extraterritorial jurisdiction is gradually absorbing Palestinian land within the Israeli state; if this remains unchallenged, the process of conquest through an expansion of jurisdiction could become irreversible, clearly contravening international law.   Taking the example of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine (which are a “flagrant violation under international...

...documents and the court granted the juvenile’s application for subpoenas duces tecum. But the Navajo nation refused to provide the documents. Why? Navajo lawyers argued that the subpoena would be ignored because “the Navajo Nation is a separate sovereign nation, and as a matter of public policy, foreign subpoenas issued from neighboring sovereigns are not honored.” Instead of complying with this foreign order the juvenile should follow a “routine procedure for domestication of extra-territorial subpoenas through the Navajo Nation courts.” The court granted a second motion to compel, but the...

...reach. The Supreme Court’s decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank, 130 S. Ct. 2869 (2010), confirms the distinction between substantive statutes to which the presumption against extraterritoriality applies and jurisdictional statutes to which it does not. In Morrison, the Court used the presumption to limit a substantive provision of the Securities Exchange Act, finding “no affirmative indication in the Exchange Act that § 10(b) applies extraterritorially.” Id. at 2883. But notably, the Court did not apply the presumption against extraterritoriality to the Exchange Act’s jurisdictional provision. To the contrary,...

...human rights system. This will be the focus of this piece. The Inter-American Court, taking into consideration all asylum treaties, and, in particular, the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees of 1951, has held that the right to seek and receive asylum through recognition of refugee status “sets certain specific obligations upon the State: i) the obligation of non-refoulement and its extraterritorial application; ii) the obligation to allow to file asylum applications and not to push back at the border; iii) the obligation not to criminalise or sanction...

...breakaway region of South Ossetia in August 2008 (More on the facts here). Even though the Court found numerous violations of human rights committed by Russia after the cessation of active hostilities and signing of a ceasefire agreement on 12 August (the right to life, prohibition of inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to property and housing rights, the right to liberty and the freedom of movement), the judgment has been criticised (e.g. here and here) due to the Court’s determination that Russian Federation did not exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction during...

...to either ignore or downplay that it is people from host states who file extraterritorial complaints in home states and that host states are typically either indifferent or actively supporting claimants. Instead, home states often support the companies incorporated within their territories operating abroad through several means. This includes signing investment and trade agreements aimed at protecting home states corporations from foreign laws and courts (See e.g. Sornarajah) or filing amicus curiae in support of home states’ corporations (See e.g. the Netherlands and UK amicus curiae in Kiobel). Therefore, to...

as the extraterritorial application of statutes, the rise of universal jurisdiction, and the “dollarization” of less developed countries, those borders remain fundamentally important in areas such as immigration and enforcement jurisdiction. Moreover, in each area in which territoriality has declined, the reasons for decline have differed. The abandonment of national currencies has been driven by economic motivations and competitive forces, while the extraterritorial application of statutes has been driven more by changes in ideas, with the evolution of approaches to extraterritoriality paralleling changes in thinking about the conflict of laws....

...States does not accept the extraterritorial application of the canonical human rights treaties with respect to its own conduct and those of its agents outside of the territorial United States, so from the US point of view, that distinction is legally neither here nor there. In order to give the geographical distinction content, Koh’s argument says not that human rights law applies with respect to the US, but instead that the requirements of self-defense independently require an imminence of threat analysis even within an armed conflict that includes AQAP as...

...Post Facto Clause of the U.S. Constitution that it prohibits prosecutions for actions that were not criminal at the time they were taken. The application of the Ex Post Facto Clause is especially noteworthy here because it had been something of a question whether the U.S. Constitution (other than the Suspension Clause the Supreme Court recognized guaranteed the Guantanamo Bay detainees a constitutional right to seek a writ of habeas corpus) applied to non-citizens held at Guantanamo Bay. While stopping short of answering the question of extraterritorial application directly, the...