Search: extraterritorial sanctions

“Chucky” Taylor, son of former Liberian President (and current war crimes defendant) Charles Taylor, was convicted Friday in Florida federal court of committing torture when he was with his father in Liberia. What makes Taylor’s conviction news (although only news overseas, apparently, since it didn’t make any of the leading U.S. newspapers) is that it is the first conviction under the 1994 Extraterritorial Torture Statute, 18 U.S.C. 234 and 2340A, which was enacted to implement U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture (for an interesting profile of Chucky in Rolling...

...ground. It implicitly distinguished a de jure and de facto basis of extraterritorial jurisdiction. The Netherlands formally (de jure) had jurisdiction because the territorial entity, the State of Bosnia-Herzegovina, had basically surrendered its competence to govern in the area to the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). Clearly, UNPROFOR cannot be equated with the State of the Netherlands, but considering the Supreme Court’s answer to the attribution question (see above), this was nonetheless relevant. The Netherlands also had de facto jurisdiction, because an examination of the facts had shown that it...

...Article XIV will prove a major hurdle to liberalization of trade in services conducted electronically. Article XIV allows countries to derogate from their liberalization obligations if necessary to protect public morals or the public order. This escape valve seems a wise measure to prevent the imposition of sanctions in cases where a particular trade liberalization would imperil domestic morals or domestic order. The proponents of GATS recognized, however, that claims of public morals or public order might be used to disguise protectionist regulation, and thus the WTO properly limited the...

...that statute, and why the Supreme Court keeps trying to limit its extraterritorial reach. But human rights lawyers and NGOs only resort to what are essentially legal loopholes like the ATS, because it’s so extraordinarily difficult to litigate cases about human rights abuses across different countries. I think it speaks to a broader structural imbalance enmeshed in our international legal institutions: that it’s far easier for powerful state actors and wealthy corporations to access (or evade) justice than poorer nations or oppressed individuals.    Another thing that I discovered is...

...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...

...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...

[Christopher A. Whytock is a Professor of Law and Political Science at UC Irvine School of Law] I do not think the Court’s opinion in Kiobel means that ATS litigation in federal courts is going away any time soon. First, make no mistake, the “presumption against extraterritoriality” applied by the Court in Kiobel is a new creation that is likely to give rise to further litigation. In at least three ways, the new presumption is different from the Morrison-style presumption used by the Court to determine whether a federal statute...

...readable. Nevertheless, because praising a book quickly becomes boring (for everyone other than the author!), I will try to bring out some differences in our assessments of at least part of the historical materials he discusses – in particular, those which concern the question of the extraterritorial application of the Bill of Rights. One of Kal’s core claims is about the fundamentality of territoriality in the development of U.S. law, including with respect to the application of the Bill of Rights to aliens overseas. The importance and topicality of this...

...4. Participation Conditions for Non-State Actors 5. NGO Involvement Conditions on Joining a Treaty 6. Consent to be Bound 7. Reservations 8. Declarations and Notifications Constituting the Treaty and its Dissemination 9. Languages 10. Annexes 11. Entry into Force 12. The Depositary Applying the Treaty 13. Provisional Application 14. Territorial and Extraterritorial Application 15. Federal States 16. Relationships to Other Treaties 17. Derogations 18. Dispute Settlement Amendments 19. Standard Amendment Procedures 20. Simplified Amendment Procedures The End of Treaty Relations 21. Withdrawal or Denunciation 22. Suspension 23. Duration and Termination...

[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...

...is that the role of judicial review over extraterritorial targeting decisions is highly limited, at most, even when US citizens are involved. The accountability as such is between the political branches. Many people, including me, have urged the USG to greater transparency as to legal review and standards, not as some supposed legal obligation, but as an important tool for political accountability and legitimacy. (3) The CIA has been given an important diplomatic and political task in conducting operations in Pakistan that, up until recently and perhaps even still today,...

...applicable to extraterritorial actions, at least in these ways — even if one grants, as the US does not, that the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), for example, applies extraterritorially. The US government has responded to the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Execution that it regards his inquiries as beyond his legal mandate because they run to armed conflict, and therefore outside of his remit. I’d add (and I haven’t double checked; perhaps the Obama administration has actually said) that even outside of armed conflict law, targeting of...