Search: extraterritorial sanctions
22 Jul Carrot and Stick: How Western States Lure and Pressure Third States into Cooperating in Migration Control and What This Means for Migrants’ Rights
...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...22 Aug Goodbye ATS? U.S. Appeals Court Dismisses South African Apartheid ATS Case and Rejects Narrow Reading of Kiobel
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...28 Feb Parsing the Oral Arguments in Kiobel and Mohamad
...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...26 Feb The Perils of Reducing International Lawyers to Their Nationality: A Response to Vamos-Goldman
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...17 Apr The Death of Universal Civil Jurisdiction Under the ATS
...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...
26 Apr The ICJ and the ECtHR’s Provisional Measures in the “Lachin Corridor” in Azerbaijan: Can Armenia Use the Civilian Passage for Military Purposes?
...cargo entry to Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region. It is not an extraterritorial corridor as Armenia and Russia do not have any sovereign rights (e.g., transit rights) over the road. Azerbaijan’s laws apply to the passage. Azerbaijan’s army, police, customs, and other agencies do not check the persons and cargo yet. The Russian peacekeeping force supposedly exercises this function on behalf of Azerbaijan in the passage and also in Karabakh as well. However, unclear passage rules in the Lachin corridor are the main cause of this international legal dispute. To prevent...08 Dec A Response to Justine Nolan by Odette Murray, David Kinley and Chip Pitts
...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...12 Apr The Coming Attack on Syria Will Be Unlawful
...the Russian gander. This is the most frightening aspect of Trump’s madness: although the Syrian military is capable of doing far more damage to American forces than Iraq’s or Libya’s militaries ever were, Russia’s military is one of the most powerful and technologically-sophisticated in the world. A hot war between Russia and the US could be literally catastrophic. None of this jus ad bellum analysis should be remotely controversial — at least not to those who don’t believe the US has the God-given right to use extraterritorial force wherever and...27 Jul Does the Constitution Follow the Flag? The Evolution of Territoriality in American Law
...are much less well known. Regardless, until now these parts have not been put together and treated as an interconnected, if occasionally wide-ranging, narrative. My third aim is to advance several more specific claims about this legal evolution. First, the central concept of extraterritoriality has shown surprising continuity in its purpose even as its form has changed dramatically. Extraterritoriality meant very different things to nineteenth-century lawyers than it does to contemporary lawyers. But the primary function of extraterritoriality has remained, at a fundamental level, the same. That function, I argue,...
24 Jan Taking Territory of a Third State Seriously: Beginning of IAC and the Strike Against Major General Soleimani (Part I)
[ Pouria Askary is an assistant professor of international law at Allameh Tabataba’i University, and Katayoun Hosseinnejad is a university lecturer of international law in Iran.] As discussed by many scholars and commentators (see e.g. here, here and here) the extraterritorial operation by the US armed forces on 3 January 2020 at Baghdad international airport which led to the assassination of Major General Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran, was a flagrant violation of the peremptory norm on prohibition of the use of force enshrined in Article...