Search: extraterritorial sanctions

...in recent years’ should take cognizance of the fact ‘expanding punishment resources will have more effect on cases of marginal seriousness rather than those that provoke the greatest degree of citizen fear. The result is that when fear of lethal violence is translated into a general campaign against crime, the major share of extra resources will directed at nonviolent behavior.’ [….] [C]rime crackdowns have their most dramatic impact on less serious offenses that are close to the margin between incarceration and more lenient penal sanctions. The pattern of nonviolent offenses...

...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...

...President of the United States had made it clear that torture anywhere was an affront to human dignity everywhere and that freedom from torture was an inalienable right. Beyond the protections in the Constitution, United States criminal law prohibited torture. There were no exceptions to that prohibition. The Congress had also passed laws that provided for severe federal sanctions, both civil and criminal, against those who engaged in torture outside the territory of the United States…. In respect of Committee questions concerning United States actions taken in response to the...

...H St. NW, Washington, DC, USA. For registration information, see here. For those who cannot make it in person, the event will be webcast for free. For further information, see here. Announcements The Codification Division of the Office of Legal Affairs recently added the following lecture to the Lecture Series of the United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law (AVL) website: Mr. Alejandro Chehtman on “Extraterritorial criminal jurisdiction” (in Spanish). The Audiovisual Library is also available as an audio podcast, which can be accessed through the preinstalled applications in Apple...

...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...

...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...

...— it’s unclear from the fact sheet — its new understanding of the use of lethal force applies only to the current conflict. Second, although I don’t imagine that the US much cares, the jus ad bellum-like targeting standards announced in the fact sheet do not necessarily satisfy the limitations on lethal force imposed by international human rights law. As I have pointed out ad nauseum on the blog (see here for an example), whether an extraterritorial use of force is legitimate under the jus ad bellum says nothing about...

...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...

Andras Vamos-Goldman has a long post today at Just Security criticising the UK’s recent adoption of the Overseas Operations (Service Personnel and Veterans) Bill, which will make it considerably more difficult for British courts to prosecute soldiers who commit international crimes overseas or to hear civil actions brought by the victims of such crimes. He also decries in general the lack of commitment a number of powerful democracies have shown to international criminal justice, singling out for special opprobrium — not surprisingly — the Trump administration’s sanctions against ICC officials...

...as a universal civil jurisdiction decision, although it was grounded in U.S. historical analysis that seemed to coincide with universal civil jurisdiction. Still, as I noted before, Justice Breyer did not build on the Sosa concurrence in today’s Kiobel opinion. Instead, he revived the quite rarely invoked “protective” principle to justify the ATS’ extraterritorial reach. He then added that preventing war criminals from winning a “safe harbor” in the U.S. was within the protective principle (that’s a somewhat dubious interpretation to me). This is a much narrower approach than I...