Search: extraterritorial sanctions

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...

majority’s opinion may have made the ATS more robust by clearing up some issues, she agreed with other commentators that Justice Breyer’s concurrence took the better conceptual approach. Anthony Colangelo criticised the majority opinion for extending the presumption against extraterritoriality to causes of action, which as part of lex fori are by definition not extraterritorial. Also favouring the Breyer concurrence was John Knox, who was happy to see the presumption against extrajurisdictionality resurfacing. Alex Mills pointed out that by applying a presumption against total extraterritoriality, i.e. in foreign cubed cases,...

...Intergovernmental Agreement (ISS-IGA). The moniker comes from NASA’s mission to land “the first woman and the next man” on the Moon by 2024. More recently, NASA has released its constitutive principles (Artemis Principles). The latest move follows President Trump’s Executive Order (EO) promulgated in April 2020 which recapitulates the US policy on commercial recovery and use of space resources. The Order clearly stated that the US does not view outer space as “a global commons”—a term used to signify extraterritorial spaces with common-pool resources. The Accord is consistent with the...

...sought to “underscore the distinction between a principle of law, which is a matter of substance, and the means of enforcing it, which is a matter of procedure or remedy.”[7] The Court holds that the issue of corporate liability under the ATS is one of remedy, to be determined by domestic law. The Exxon and Flomo judgments also consider a number of other important issues in ATS jurisprudence, including the dismissal of the defendants’ arguments against the extraterritorial application of the ATS, and, in Exxon, the identification of the correct...

...the Russian gander. This is the most frightening aspect of Trump’s madness: although the Syrian military is capable of doing far more damage to American forces than Iraq’s or Libya’s militaries ever were, Russia’s military is one of the most powerful and technologically-sophisticated in the world. A hot war between Russia and the US could be literally catastrophic. None of this jus ad bellum analysis should be remotely controversial — at least not to those who don’t believe the US has the God-given right to use extraterritorial force wherever and...

...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...

[ Pouria Askary is an assistant professor of international law at Allameh Tabataba’i University, and Katayoun Hosseinnejad is a university lecturer of international law in Iran.] As discussed by many scholars and commentators (see e.g. here, here and here) the extraterritorial operation by the US armed forces on 3 January 2020 at Baghdad international airport which led to the assassination of Major General Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran, was a flagrant violation of the peremptory norm on prohibition of the use of force enshrined in Article...

...criteria for statehood (Montevideo Convention, 1933), which requires (a) permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Yet, it has been recognized (ICRC Commentary of 2016) that NIACs can involve extraterritorial aspects, when a foreign State – District 13 – joins one party to the conflict – the rebel groups from the other Districts, rendering the conflict non-international in nature, as long as the State does not exercise effective control of the groups, which is not the case. Having...

...on extraterritoriality. Now the conservatives point to U.S. law – the judge-made presumption against extraterritoriality – and liberals point to the international status of the offenses. It is like a game of Twister. Neither position is fully correct. There may be a place for extraterritoriality in ATS cases, but in a much narrower class of cases then where it is currently applied. The following two posts will draw on much of my prior work, and I hope the reader forgives me not recapitulating the entire argument of those articles here....

In reading Kal’s description of territoriality’s ebb and flow, I was particularly interested in the evolution in judicial thinking with regard to constitutional scope or domain. His description of the path from In re Ross, which stated emphatically that the Constitution does not follow the flag, to Reid and Boumediene, which give some extra-territorial force to the Bill of Rights and other constitutional guarantees, is excellent. The evolution has obviously been gradual, even glacial. Within this narrative, there are some fascinating examples of courts dramatically pushing constitutional boundaries outward, including...

...investigations into international crimes in Ukraine” (p. 10), Trial international notes more generally the “increasing use of the principles of universal and extraterritorial jurisdiction to curb impunity for international crimes” (see here). But, how can a State prosecute efficiently persons accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity or other serious international crimes in cases when the relevant conduct took place in the territory of one State, (some of) the victims and witnesses have found refuge in the territory of another, and the author is present in the territory of yet...

...allow them to provide further guidance in such cases. Kiobel was something of an outlier—a class action against a foreign parent corporation (Royal Dutch Shell) based entirely on its foreign subsidiary’s activities in a foreign country (Nigeria), in which the foreign parent’s home countries (the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) objected that their own courts were more appropriate forums for the plaintiffs’ claims. The Supreme Court held that the principles underlying the presumption against extraterritoriality limit the causes of action that may be brought under the ATS, but it did...