Search: extraterritorial sanctions
14 Mar YLS Sale Symposium: A Salvage Operation–Refugee Rights Advocacy in the United States after Sale
[Bill Frelick is the director of Human Rights Watch’s Refugee Rights Program. See part one of his post here.] Since Sale v. Haitian Centers Council judgment in 1993 settled the issue of extraterritorial application of the principle of nonrefoulement in US domestic law, US-based refugee rights advocates after 1993 were left without recourse to US courts. But, writing for the Sale majority, Justice Stevens had said, “The wisdom of the policy choices by Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton is not a matter for our consideration.” Accordingly, US advocates turned their...11 May The Most Cited US Cases Related to International Law
...they make or domestic issues that they raise. So take all this with a grain of salt. Add any cases I missed in the comments, and we’ll turn this post into a wiki. Nonetheless, note that the most cited case US case related to international law that I found comes from the Second Circuit – U.S. v. Alcoa (extraterritorial jurisdiction) has been cited 714 times. BNC v. Sabbatino, the act of state doctrine case, came next with 501 references. Two comity cases, Hilton v. Guyot and Hartford Fire v. CA...
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....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...26 Feb The Perils of Reducing International Lawyers to Their Nationality: A Response to Vamos-Goldman
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...
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...
12 Apr The Apartheid Reports: A Paradigm Shift on Israel/Palestine (Part I)
[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,...