Search: extraterritorial sanctions

...ATS claims arising in the territory of foreign states would require rejecting thirty years of ATS litigation, including the holding of Filártiga v. Peña-Irala. As Justice Kagan explained, it would also require abandoning the reasoning of the Court’s 2004 decision in Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain. Justice Scalia pointed out that applying the presumption against extraterritoriality would bar claims arising on the high seas as well as those arising in the territory of a foreign state, despite Sosa’s indication that the ATS was intended to apply to piracy, an international crime that...

majority’s opinion may have made the ATS more robust by clearing up some issues, she agreed with other commentators that Justice Breyer’s concurrence took the better conceptual approach. Anthony Colangelo criticised the majority opinion for extending the presumption against extraterritoriality to causes of action, which as part of lex fori are by definition not extraterritorial. Also favouring the Breyer concurrence was John Knox, who was happy to see the presumption against extrajurisdictionality resurfacing. Alex Mills pointed out that by applying a presumption against total extraterritoriality, i.e. in foreign cubed cases,...

...Intergovernmental Agreement (ISS-IGA). The moniker comes from NASA’s mission to land “the first woman and the next man” on the Moon by 2024. More recently, NASA has released its constitutive principles (Artemis Principles). The latest move follows President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) promulgated in April 2020 which recapitulates the US policy on commercial recovery and use of space resources. The Order clearly stated that the US does not view outer space as “a global commons”—a term used to signify extraterritorial spaces with common-pool resources. The Accord is consistent with the...

[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.] Over the last 18 months,...

...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...

...brought them there, the court concluded that the “practical obstacles inherent in resolving the prisoner’s entitlement to the writ” while petitioners were detained in an active theater of war weighed against recognizing an extraterritorial constitutional right to habeas. Many things to say on the decision’s import and meaning, but here I’ll just start with two unrelated points. First, on the import. Whatever one thinks of the opinion on the merits, it may be easy to overstate its practical significance. The Obama Administration’s litigation strategy in all of its highest profile...

I’m looking forward to our joint symposium on Marko’s impressive book on extraterritorial treaty application. But before that begins, I wanted to flag a new opportunity for those looking to get international experience outside the United States. The Fulbright Program is inaugurating a new ‘Public Policy Fellowship’ for academic year 2012-2013. Here’s how they described it to me: The Fulbright Public Policy Fellowship will allow fellows to serve in professional placements in foreign government ministries or institutions and gain hands-on public sector experience in participating foreign countries while simultaneously carrying...

...exalted the so-called statutory “presumption against extraterritoriality,” a trend the current Court strengthened in its recent Kiobel decision. Justice Blackmun’s compelling dissent skewered the majority, underscoring not only that the text and meaning of the INA and Refugee Convention were simple and crystalline—“Vulnerable refugees shall not be returned”—but also that that object and purpose would be entirely thwarted if those legal obligations did not apply extraterritoriality to protect fleeing refugees. Looking back, Justice Stevens’ decision is most striking for its frank and admirable acknowledgement of the “moral weight “ of...

...international efforts focus primarily on preventing the effects of such threats, rather than on addressing the threats themselves or sanctioning them. There may be an implicit understanding that deviates from the stricter conclusions of the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion. Specifically, the threat of force in response to the extrajudicial and extraterritorial killing of a high-ranking individual within domestic settings (even if they are considered leaders of terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US and the EU) might be viewed as a proportionate...

...Juris, David Glazier (Loyola, LA), Detlev Vagts (Harvard), Roger Clark (Rutgers-Camden), Devin Pendas (Boston College) and Lawrence Douglas (Amherst). The discussion will start with a cross-posted introduction by Kevin today, and end with his reply to the discussants on Friday. Both the discussants and our readers are of course welcome to join in in the comments. Following discussion of Kevin’s book, Opinio Juris and EJIL:Talk! will host a joint discussion of Marko Milanovic’s book, Extraterritorial Application of Human Rights Treaties: Law, Principles and Policy (Oxford UP). Cross-posted at EJIL: Talk!...

...prompted to respond to a legal finding of genocide through sanctions, boycotts, or the pursuit of universal jurisdiction cases, especially in light of Article I’s obligations “to prevent and to punish,” which the Court has long held are “not territorially limited by the Convention.” This extraterritorial duty will, as mentioned previously, be relevant to the Ukraine case, in which the Court will determine whether Russia’s use of military force to prevent and punish “genocide” in Ukraine is legal. This inquiry could, in tandem with an advisory opinion on whether China...

...over who crosses U.S. borders, it’s not for the courts to decide otherwise absent some very clear authorization. So “what law authorized the district court to order the government to bring petitioners to the United States and release them here?” Not the Due Process Clause, says the D.C. Circuit. Immigration cases have always held that the Constitution doesn’t extend to non-citizens held beyond the “sovereign territory” of the United States. (Never mind, I suppose, that Justice Kennedy’s Boumediene majority no longer thinks sovereignty is the touchstone for the extraterritorial extension...