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...11 May RFRA at Guantanomo Bay
...precedent in Rasul v. Bush, the district court ruled that RFRA applies to Guantanomo Bay. Here is an excerpt: The defendants argue that RFRA does not apply extraterritorially, specifically, to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay…. The defendants argue that Congress intended for RFRA to apply only to government action in the continental United States…. RFRA defines the government to include, inter alia, covered entities. 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-2(1). In turn, covered entities means “the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and each territory and possession of...
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....
27 Oct International Law and Popular Culture Symposium: International Law and the Theatre – An Interview with Playwright Anchuli Felicia King
...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...
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...