Search: extraterritorial sanctions

...brought them there, the court concluded that the “practical obstacles inherent in resolving the prisoner’s entitlement to the writ” while petitioners were detained in an active theater of war weighed against recognizing an extraterritorial constitutional right to habeas. Many things to say on the decision’s import and meaning, but here I’ll just start with two unrelated points. First, on the import. Whatever one thinks of the opinion on the merits, it may be easy to overstate its practical significance. The Obama Administration’s litigation strategy in all of its highest profile...

...as M/V Wise Honest’s flag state, would likely never have authorised foreign interdiction and equally, in such cases, never diverted the M/V Wise Honest to an appropriate port for inspection as then required (Res 2375, para. 8). Clearly, designation of the M/V Wise Honest by the UN Sanctions Committee and publication of DPRK’s noncompliance (Res 2375, paras. 8-9) would have been a more palatable result for DPRK than risking the loss of a cargo vessel at a time when all states are to prevent the transfer of new or used...

...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...

...well, allowing for the possible interposition of procedural bars to the making of Alien Tort claims (as pushed by Sotomayor). He got in an effective IG Farben analogy and even a little human rights speechifying (see p. 55). Breyer gets the award for zinger of the day: “if Hitler isn’t a pirate, who is?” (Anyone want to do the legal math on that one?) So predictions of the ATS (extraterritorial) demise may be premature. On the other hand, recent experience demonstrates that predictions based on oral arguments are not especially...

...malaise about removing human judgment from the cycle of violence, including at the stage of executing orders. For example, Christof Heyns, then UN Expert on Extraterritorial Execution, called the use of force without reflection “mechanical slaughter.” One of the concerns expressed by Heyns, in comparing AWS with human soldiers, was precisely the lack of “ability of robots to distinguish legal from illegal orders.” The development of mechanical soldiers has, it seems, contributed to a greater recognition of the value of human judgment and common sense in human soldiers. Embracing that...

...populated space on its own territory, the state may lack control over these parts. Practice of human rights bodies suggests though that siege scenarios are unlikely to translate into reduced state obligations vis-à-vis the besieged population when undertaking military actions. Extraterritorial jurisdiction also appears to exist. Secondly, it is controversial whether human rights obligations for armed groups exist or not. Finally, there is the difficulty to determine the actual content of the right to food applicable during armed conflict. Obviously, the obligations to respect, protect and fulfill the right to...

...the United Nations in a question of enforcing UN Security Council sanctions is the same as that between the United States and Egypt in the case of the extraterritorial application of anti-trust law. But to think that the two scenarios are governed equally by politics alone, is to miss something important. Post-national governance, to use the fashionable term, involves more than mere “multiplicity.” It depends on constitutional connective tissue between the various legal systems that are at play with one another. The plural theory of constitutionalism that I, for one,...

...greater fidelity to traditional understandings of international law. (Harold Koh, the former Legal Advisor to the U.S. Department of State, made similar pleas around transparency during his May 7 speech at Oxford.) These are all critical points that Congress and others should be hearing, but I would like to shift the focus—away from U.S. responsibilities and on to the responsibilities of the States that consent to the use lethal force on their territories. This is part of the “drone” discussion (or, to be more accurate, the “extraterritorial use of lethal...

...Richard Lazarus helpfully commented to us during the inaugural Harvard-Boalt-UCLA Junior Environmental Scholar workshop that he has seen variations of this before – that this lawsuit would be an attempt to change the “default position” in an unresolved environmental conflict. I think that is true, although we did not articulate that as directly or elegantly as Professor Lazarus did. Our paper presents a melding of two different conflicting perspectives. Austen Parrish, the international scholar, generally laments the extraterritorial application of domestic law, while I, the environmentalist, look for ways to...

...the Quasi-War and Seminole War.” But Kent notes that simply because the Constitution does not govern extraterritorial uses of coercive force, it does not mean that the Founders considered such actions extra-legal. The law of nations constrained the U.S. government’s actions abroad. If you will recall this exchange between the Solicitor General Paul Clement and Justice Souter in the recent oral argument in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, you understand the gravity of Kent’s position. The modern application of Kent’s argument is that if the writ cannot be suspended, it does not...

...to the exigencies of Latin America’s strong commitment to human rights and democratic values. This is why non-intervention now coexists with the Inter-American Democratic Charter, as seen above. The Lima Group’s statement and Mexico’s opposition to it, take place in the context of one such particularly hot-topic discussion: economic sanctions. Every year, the Human Rights Council approves a Resolution on “unilateral coercive measures and human rights”. This resolution calls upon states to stop adopting unilateral measures “of a coercive nature with extraterritorial effects, which create obstacles to trade relations among...

...proposition that the Rome Statute obligates state parties to enact universal jurisdiction for ICC crimes Step 2: the decision to code a state as having enacted universal jurisdiction if it (a) is a party to the Rome Statute and (b) its domestic law provides for jurisdiction over crimes obligated by international treaty As I explained in my original post, Step 1 is flawed. The Rome Statute does not include universal jurisdiction, and has no obligation whatsoever for state parties to provide (extraterritorial) jurisdiction for ICC crimes. I suspect that the...