Search: extraterritorial sanctions
22 May A Word on Maqaleh
...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...09 May Bellinger Concludes Testimony Before UN Committee Against Torture
...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...02 Apr Events and Announcements: April 2, 2019
...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...
07 Mar The (il)Legality of Israel’s Prolonged Occupation of the Palestinian Territory: Perspectives From the UN Special Rapporteur and Commission of Inquiry’s September 2022 Reports
...annex East Jerusalem (paras. 14–16); (ii) the establishment of settlements and outposts in the West Bank, and the associated exploitation of natural resources, building of settler-only roads and infrastructures, demographic engineering measures, and extraterritorial application of Israeli domestic law to settlements and settlers (paras. 24–47); and (iii) the unequivocal statements by Israeli officials of the intent to appropriate permanently portions of the West Bank (paras. 48–53). The importance of the COI’s report is that it considered Israel’s violation of binding rules of international law not in isolation, but in the...08 Jan You Know the Holidays Are Over When
...Afghanistan? Justice Kennedy’s ruling in Boumediene was nothing if not intensely functional in nature, so the parties’ briefs (and argument) devoted substantial time to discussing how the Kennedy criteria for determining when/whether the U.S. Constitution applies extraterritorially: (1) the citizenship and status of the detainees and the process for determining their status; (2) the nature of the sites of apprehension and detention; and (3) the practical obstacles to extraterritorial application of the constitutional right. As usual, the best account of the hearing can be found at Scotusblog. Yesterday’s upshot: U.S....31 Jul More Detention Cases
A quick note on the two latest case examples on the table in our ongoing detention debate. First, Mr. Al-Marwallah’s case is a prime example of why we shouldn’t make broad new detention policy based on the problems of Gitmo alone. Mr. Al-Marwallah may not be prosecutable for taking terrorist training pre-2001 since the criminal material support statute in effect at that time may not (emphasize may) have had the requisite extraterritorial scope. Any such lacuna in the substantive scope of the criminal law has since been corrected. Mr. Al-Marwallah,...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...
01 Oct Unlocking the Road to Justice in Syria
...of documentation cannot be overestimated. As part of the efforts to resist denialism, dedicated documentation efforts have foregrounded the experiences of victims/survivors, kept their narratives alive, and provided a wealth of evidence to push back against misinformation and revisionism. Second, and related to this, documentation has also laid the basis of the most remarkable and internationally discussed developments, namely criminal litigation efforts that opened a crack in the wall of impunity. Multiple prosecutorial initiatives under the principle of universal jurisdiction – as well as other forms of extraterritorial jurisdiction –...
13 Jul Notice of Retraction
We regret to inform our readers that we have had to remove a post entitled “Legality of Extraterritorial Coercive Economic Measures Taken Against Russia from the Lens of International Trade Law” and published on our site in September 2022. It has recently come to our attention (and has been conceded by the author submitting that piece) that the post was translated and reproduced in substantial part from the piece “Considerazioni Sulle Misure Coercitive Adottate Nei Confronti Della Federazione Russa E Della Bielorussia Alla Luce Del Diritto Del Commercio Internazionale”, authored...16 Jan Post-Kiobel, Are We All Ready to Move On From the ATS?
...for the Court by Chief Justice John Roberts and the main concurring opinion by Justice Stephen Breyer refused to interpret the ATS as authorizing universal jurisdiction. All nine justices rejected decades of lower-court precedent and widespread scholarly opinion when they held that the ATS excluded cases involving purely extraterritorial conduct, even if the alleged conduct constituted acts that are universally proscribed under international law. In this short essay, I argue that the surprising death of universal jurisdiction reflects the triumph of the “separation of powers” critique of the ATS, which...