Search: extraterritorial sanctions

...access to victims. The United States has ended military aid to Myanmar and imposed economic sanctions in response to the human rights abuses being committed in Myanmar. Secretary Pompeo has pledged to hold those responsible for the “abhorrent ethnic cleansing” accountable. It has also recently announced that it will provide more than $185M in humanitarian aid to Myanmar’s Rakhine State. The United States commissioned its own investigation into the Rohingya situation involving over 1000 randomly selected refugees in camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, who were surveyed in April 2018. The...

...the situation violates both the Charter and general international law. Any support or cooperation with an apartheid state contravenes both the AU Constitutive Act and the Charter. When the OAU was formed, it called for sanctions against apartheid South Africa and called on its member states to contribute 1% of their budget to the liberation struggle. Other countries suspended their diplomatic relations with South Africa, boycotted its companies, and refrained from doing business with South Africa. Second, the right to self-determination has an extraterritorial reach in the sense that States...

...while in reality none was found. On the other hand, a Byelorussian oppositionist and his girlfriend, who were among the passengers, got detained during the ‘security operation’. The whole affair turned into a diplomatic scandal, accusations of Belarus breaching international air laws, the suspension of flights through the Belarusian airspace linked with the suspension of operating permits for Belorussian national carrier Belavia as well as economic and person-targeted sanctions. Was the diversion of the Ryanair plane by the Belarusian army in accordance with international law? The paramount question surrounding the...

Justice Holmes famously argued that “If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.” Holmes was articulating the contractual concept of an efficient breach. If the costs of performance exceed the benefits to all the parties, a breach of contract is...

...of Russia’s aggression and the demand that Russia abide by its humanitarian law obligations. Despite international denunciation of Russia’s aggression and a barrage of EU and U.S. sanctions, 57% of Russians blamed NATO for the death and destruction in Ukraine, 17% blamed Ukraine itself, and only 7% blamed Russia, according to Levada. Levada also found Putin’s approval rating rose from 61% in August 2021 to 83% in March 2022. That Russian public opinion is so much at odds with the way much of the rest of the world views the...

...a recent Senate report. A group calling itself “Official Cyber Caliphate” said it hacked the official website of national carrier Malaysia Airlines, but the airline said its data servers remained intact and passenger bookings were not affected. North Korea on Friday demanded the lifting of sanctions, imposed by South Korea after a 2010 attack on one of its naval vessels, as a condition for resuming dialogue. Europe Spain will start talks with the United States about further increasing the number of U.S. troops at an air base in the south...

...efforts to bring about significant improvements in the conditions in Sudan through sanctions against the Government of Sudan and high level diplomatic engagement and by supporting the deployment of peacekeepers in Darfur. This Act purports to authorize State and local governments to divest from companies doing business in named sectors in Sudan and thus risks being interpreted as insulating from Federal oversight State and local divestment actions that could interfere with implementation of national foreign policy. However, as the Constitution vests the exclusive authority to conduct foreign relations with the...

Kenya’s Supreme Court has upheld Uhuru Kenyatta’s election as president. Although there were some riots over the weekend and five were killed, the situation in Kenya is described as calm but tense. North Korea has described its nuclear weapons program as the nation’s life, and has vowed to continue it despite the international sanctions. South Korea, meanwhile, has vowed a swift response to any provocation by the North and the US has deployed more radar-evading fighter jets. French-supported Malian forces are fighting Tuareg rebels in the north of Mali after...

...far is refuse to appoint an arbitrator. Second, as any private international commercial arbitrator could tell you, consent to an arbitration does not in any way guarantee enforcement. Indeed, in private commercial arbitrations, judicial enforcement proceedings are common and necessary to force parties to comply with arbitral awards. To put this another way, if China had participated in the arbitration by appointing an arbitrator, I don’t think it would have affected its likelihood of complying with any arbitral award. UNCLOS does not have any sanctions regime akin to, say the...

...Resettlement of displaced people. As issues of return affect not just Ukraine and Russia, but the international organisations who manage issues of resettlement and return, and the third-party host states, this is an issue that is likely to require some level of geopolitical agreement. Sanctions relief, reconstruction and international financial support. These all require geopolitical agreement between those involved in imposing sanctions, and will need to be linked to whatever settlement is agreed between Russia and Ukraine. Regional stability framework. Any wider regional stability framework that would attempt to include...

The LA Times recently carried this op-ed by former Australian FM Gareth Evans on the successes of preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping (perhaps better described as peacemaking) missions around the world. He cites the Human Security Report 2005 for evidence that the incidence of war is on the decline, and that third-party interventions (diplomatic, sanctions, military deployments) play a large role in the success stories. As Evans notes, one of the problems of measuring success is how to determine the conflicts that were avoided – the Holmesian (Sherlock, not Oliver Wendell)...

South Sudan’s Parliament has ratified a border and oil deal with Sudan, which includes a demilitarized zone between the two states. The EU has placed new sanctions on Iranian oil, gas and tanker companies, the effects of which Iran calls futile. In related news, A NYTimes article describes the impact of European sanctions on Iran’s ability to keep the money printing presses going. Invoking humanitarian reasons, the UK government has blocked the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the United States where he is wanted for hacking into military computers in...