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Search: extraterritorial sanctions

26 Apr

...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...
26.04.23 | |

17 Apr

...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...
17.04.13 | |

26 Feb

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...
26.02.21 | |

03 Oct

...night at the City Bar will address whether international law has seen “The Death of Sovereignty?” in an era of debt downgrades, seccesionist conflicts, and covert military operations — and will be followed by a free wine and cheese reception. Panels starting at 9 a.m. on Friday at Fordham will look at International Law and U.S. Grand Strategy, the Extraterritorial Reach of Anti-Bribery Legislation Libel Tourism, the UN Disabilities Convention, Sharia and U.S. Law, Developments in Commercial Arbitration, Access to Justice in the Middle East North Africa Region, Regulation of...
03.10.11 | |

26 Jul

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...
26.07.11 | |

22 Aug

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...
22.08.13 | |

20 Oct

...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,...
20.10.11 | |

17 Mar

...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...
17.03.14 | |

03 Oct

...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...
03.10.12 | |

11 Apr

...of the key features of my forthcoming book — The Oxford Guide to Treaties is a new set of treaty clauses. The volume includes 350 clauses taken from an array of existing treaties on 23 different treaty issues, such as the various ways treaty clauses may define a treaty’s object and purpose, delineate territorial and extraterritorial application, identify a treaty’s relationship to other treaties, or authorize simplified amendment procedures. I found some of these clauses the old fashioned way, using multi-volume hard-bound sets of books like those edited by Bevans...
11.04.12 | |

25 Nov

...limiting itself to authorizing private citizen (as opposed to “national”) exploitation, and subjecting that exploitation to “international obligations of the United States.” The Act also goes on to “disclaim” extraterritorial sovereignty (shouldn’t that be “extraterrestrial” by the way?) It is the sense of Congress that by the enactment of this Act, the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body. I think the law’s backers are correct that it does not violate US treaty obligations. All...
25.11.15 | |

29 Jul

...the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is quoted as saying: “How do you understand sovereignty in the cyberdomain? It doesn’t tend to pay a lot of attention to geographic boundaries.” Putting aside what may be the fundamental territorial misunderstanding in the quote, I wonder what the evolution of territoriality suggests with regard to this national security initiative. Kal’s book details the various extraterritorial options. Conquering and controlling “cyberterritories” is obviously out of the question. But assuming soverign borders are still operative in this context, Kal’s book suggests several other options. Will...
29.07.09 | |