Search: extraterritorial sanctions
09 Nov Israel’s War in Gaza is Not a Valid Act of Self-defence in International Law
...aggression by Germany and Japan. Israel’s obligations in the law of occupation and international human rights law (applicable extraterritorially), which govern how it exercises its military authority in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, oblige it to secure public order and protect human rights. However, even if these obligations, especially those in occupation law (specifically, Article 43 of the Hague Regulations, part of occupation law) can be understood as a general matter to encompass an obligation to use force in occupied territory to neutralize threats emanating from there to...31 May IHL and International Human Rights Law in Non-International Armed Conflict
...long held (if, in my view, unfortunate) position that ICCPR doesn’t apply extraterritorially (which the report acknowledges), this seems a bit of a tough legal case to make. Beyond the trial situation (to which it seems CA3 would surely apply), as long as we’re choosing between legal regimes the United States officially rejects, why not pick APII, or API by analogy, as the more useful standard? Truly asking here. Responses to that question produced an interesting exchange on and off-line between Gabor Rona and Marty Lederman. With the relevant permission...24 Apr Kiobel Insta-Symposium: A More Positive Outlook for International Law
...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...26 Jul International Law in the U.S. Supreme Court: Professor Alford on Extraterritoriality
The joy of this project was making the kind of discovery Roger Alford recounts in his post. Alford’s chapter on international law as interpretive tool from 1901 to 1945 discusses, among other things, the Supreme Court’s various approaches to the extraterritorial reach of statutes during that period. Among these approaches was the government purpose test of Unites States v. Bowman (1922). It is interesting to compare Bowman to the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Morrison v. National Australia Bank. In Morrison, the Court applied the presumption against extraterritoriality to the...11 May RFRA at Guantanomo Bay
...precedent in Rasul v. Bush, the district court ruled that RFRA applies to Guantanomo Bay. Here is an excerpt: The defendants argue that RFRA does not apply extraterritorially, specifically, to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay…. The defendants argue that Congress intended for RFRA to apply only to government action in the continental United States…. RFRA defines the government to include, inter alia, covered entities. 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-2(1). In turn, covered entities means “the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and each territory and possession of...
07 Jan To Address Vaccine Hoarding Do Not Look to International Criminal or Human Rights Law
...as Germany, Canada, the UK, and others breach the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. He does, rightly, acknowledge that these instruments do not “have much teeth”, but without explaining why or what changes are needed to advance the fight for vaccine equality. There are significant questions about the extraterritorial reach of the CRC that are too complex for a blog post, but it is the lack of a significant enforcement mechanism that is the real problem....
13 Apr The Apartheid Reports: A Paradigm Shift on Israel/Palestine (Part II)
[Dr. Smadar Ben-Natan is an Israeli and international lawyer, and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. She studies the intersection of international law, human rights, and criminal justice in Israel/Palestine, and has published on Israeli military courts, POW status, torture, and extraterritorial human rights.] [A previous version of this commentary was published in Hebrew by the Forum for Regional Thinking, part of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. The author is a board member at B’tselem, one of the organizations discussed in this commentary.] Part I of this commentary...14 Nov FBI Concludes that Blackwater Shootings Violated Deadly Force Rules
...see an Iraqi prosecution after all since the Blackwater employees’ immunity wasn’t really all that broad. Alternatively, there are U.S. criminal statutes that might reach their activity in Iraq, but the most obvious candidate: the War Crimes Act, doesn’t seem to apply here, since these crimes don’t seem to rise to that level. The Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act may or may not apply, but that also looks murky since these were State Department contractors, not Pentagon ones. So I actually think, offhand, that the Blackwater employees face a greater danger...
28 Jun Suing Corporations for Violating International Law: A Step Forward
...that foreign corporations cannot be sued under the ATS; Nestle USA hoped to extend that bar to domestic corporations as well. The company presented only two questions for review. One was whether “general corporate activity” in the U.S. is enough to overcome the presumption against extraterritorial application of the ATS. The second was “[w]hether the Judiciary has the authority under the Alien Tort Statute to impose liability on domestic corporations.” According to Justice Alito, the second question — whether U.S. corporations can be sued — was “primary.” Not only...
21 Jul Universal Jurisdiction: Arguments for a More ‘Universal’ Double Criminality Requirement in France
...apply (here, and here). Although causing much controversy in France, double criminality is not practiced by other states actively exercising universal jurisdiction such as Belgium, Germany and Sweden. Whilst the principle is recognized as an essential safeguard to extraterritorial prosecutions before domestic courts, the present post shows that it is fulfilled in the specific context of universal jurisdiction over international crimes. Double criminality as a requirement for universal jurisdiction was first applied by the Court of Cassation in the Chaban case in November 2021. As a former reservist of the...