Search: extraterritorial sanctions

...Supreme Court has recognized over the years (in 20 cases) that corporations and companies can have duties and rights under treaty-based and customary international law. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1701992 There have always been a number of non-state actors with formal participatory roles and international law has, therefore, never been merely state-to-state. Sanctions against corporations and companies have normally been economic in nature. Better awareness of the roles of various non-state actors in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries should be helpful with respect to future efforts to assure normative compliance and effective sanctions....

...American nations, tribes, and peoples) -- e.g., http://ssrn.com/abstract=1484842 And, of course, there is the problem posed by federal preemption. Hostage Re: Of course, states are expressly bound under the Supremacy clause re: “all” treaties of the United States" ... Another interesting conumdrum is the interplay between the foreign commerce clause, the treaty obligation to accept decisions of the UN Security Council on sanctions, and individual state determinations which prohibit investment of their own pension funds & etc. in businesses doing commerce with countries that the Executive branch has placed on...

...Convention] and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts” for “effective penal sanctions” or, “if it prefers, ... hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party.” The obligation is absolute and applies with respect to alleged perpetrators of any status. As a party to the Geneva Conventions, the United States must either initiate prosecution or extradite to another state or, today, render an accused to the International Criminal Court. “Grave breaches” of the Convention include “torture or inhuman treatment” and transfer of...

...that statute, and why the Supreme Court keeps trying to limit its extraterritorial reach. But human rights lawyers and NGOs only resort to what are essentially legal loopholes like the ATS, because it’s so extraordinarily difficult to litigate cases about human rights abuses across different countries. I think it speaks to a broader structural imbalance enmeshed in our international legal institutions: that it’s far easier for powerful state actors and wealthy corporations to access (or evade) justice than poorer nations or oppressed individuals.    Another thing that I discovered is...

...each make clear that the Constitution’s reach is not so expansive that it encompasses these nonresident aliens who were injured extraterritorially while detained by the military in foreign countries where the United States is engaged in wars.” After reviewing these decisions, the Court concluded that “it is considered settled law that nonresident aliens must be within the sovereign territory of the United States to stake any claim to the rights secured by the Fifth Amendment.” And as for Eighth Amendment claims, the Court ruled that “even assuming the Eighth Amendment...

...consensus, rather than unilateral means. Unilateral extraterritorial regulation of the foreign-cubed variety, where one state purports to dictate conduct in another state’s territory, is in tension with international norms and basic principles of democracy. It’s also a perspective that believes human rights become universal not through some sort of predetermined inevitability, but only through careful building of alliances and legitimacy between different groups joined in purpose. The concern therefore should not be that U.S. courts will become the world’s courts. Rather it’s that any court, in any nation, can assert...

...criteria for statehood (Montevideo Convention, 1933), which requires (a) permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Yet, it has been recognized (ICRC Commentary of 2016) that NIACs can involve extraterritorial aspects, when a foreign State – District 13 – joins one party to the conflict – the rebel groups from the other Districts, rendering the conflict non-international in nature, as long as the State does not exercise effective control of the groups, which is not the case. Having...

...Since the 1980s, the southern neighbor has served as a buffer zone to prevent mass movement up north (FitzGerald, David Scott Refuge Beyond Reach (OUP 2019), pp. 123-159). To halt and decrease the rapidly rising numbers of asylums seekers from Central America in the last months, the US government has pushed for the above-described policies. Both policies, the extraterritorial asylum processing (‘Remain in Mexico-policy’) and the safe-third-country concept, were implemented after a combination of immense pressure from the US government and good coaxing. President Trump had used the threat to...

The Second Circuit’s decision in Balintulo v. Daimler* (already discussed at length by John Bellinger at Lawfare) is one of the first major U.S.court opinions to apply the Supreme Court’s decision in Kiobel. It is pretty much a complete smackdown of the ATS plaintiffs, and for any hopes they might have that the Kiobel decision’s bar on extraterritoriality for ATS suits would be read narrowly. While they were at it, the Court pretty much kills every other kind of ATS lawsuit as well. In particular, it rejects the notion that...

...tradition, I will hazard a guess that there will be at least one opinion supporting corporate liability (on the principle that corporations are routinely held liable for the torts of their agents), one opinion opposing corporate liability and also challenging the ATS’s grant of jurisdiction over extraterritorial conduct and over suits between aliens, and one opinion (perhaps a concurrence) opining on how ATS suits fit (or not) into the evolving global landscape of domestic adjudication of international law violations (whether these are denominated violations of international law, common law, or...

...sought to “underscore the distinction between a principle of law, which is a matter of substance, and the means of enforcing it, which is a matter of procedure or remedy.”[7] The Court holds that the issue of corporate liability under the ATS is one of remedy, to be determined by domestic law. The Exxon and Flomo judgments also consider a number of other important issues in ATS jurisprudence, including the dismissal of the defendants’ arguments against the extraterritorial application of the ATS, and, in Exxon, the identification of the correct...

...especially at the U.N. Human Rights Council. The international community has minimally stepped in to fill the accountability vacuum, for example through attempts at bringing universal and extraterritorial jurisdiction cases; the establishment of the U.N.’s Sri Lanka Accountability Project; and the sanctioning of alleged perpetrators. Accountability measures at the international level should be amplified, particularly because many victims justifiably do not trust the Sri Lankan government to address rights violations. However, for long-term change in Sri Lanka, genuine, victim and people-centered TJ processes are needed in-country. For this to occur,...