In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Search: extraterritorial sanctions

19 Oct

...is proper for a US court to find jurisdiction over a foreign corporate entity on the basis of of a US corporate subsidiary. Chief Justice Roberts flagged the importance of this further question at the very end of his Kiobel opinion, which relied upon the presumption against extraterritoriality; for something to “touch and concern” the United States, he said, sufficient to satisfy jurisdictional requirements under the ATS, contacts would have to be more than mere corporate presence. Corporations are often present in many countries, and it would reach too far...
19.10.13 | |

05 Dec

Douglas Burgess, Jr., has an editorial in today’s New York Times arguing that piracy should be considered terrorism in order to facilitate its prosecution. It’s an interesting piece, but I have to take issue with the basic premise of his argument: Are pirates a species of terrorist? In short, yes. The same definition of pirates as hostis humani generis could also be applied to international organized terrorism. Both crimes involve bands of brigands that divorce themselves from their nation-states and form extraterritorial enclaves; both aim at civilians; both involve acts...
05.12.08 | |

24 Nov

...application of IHL, the international community should not lose sight of the fact that international human rights law remains applicable to the collective international response to acts of piracy. In a companion piece, Professor Guilfoyle focuses on the law governing the extraterritorial application of human rights law, the principle of non-refoulement, the prohibition of arbitrary detention, and due process protections (see Douglas Guilfoyle, Counter-Piracy Law Enforcement and Human Rights, 59 Int’l & Comp L Q 141 (2010)). In addition, the prohibitions of summary execution and other arbitrary deprivations of the...
24.11.10 | |

23 Mar

...have  often arranged their own affairs in a way that is detrimental to access to vaccines in other countries in spite of their extraterritorial legal obligations to, at very least, avoid their actions that would foreseeably result in the impairment of the human rights of people outside their own territories. It is worth emphasizing that it has still been only some four months since the first mass vaccination campaigns began in December 2020. At the time of writing, approximately 450 million people had been vaccinated worldwide, while many African nations,...
23.03.21 | |

12 Jun

...authoritative legal treatises and over 115 law review articles and argued before the United States Supreme Court, the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal, and the International Court of Justice in the Hague. He made landmark contributions to legal scholarship and practice on issues as varied as extraterritorial jurisdiction, international arbitration, international monetary transactions, trans-border child abduction, international monetary law, investor-state dispute settlement, economic sanctions, enforcement of foreign judgments, aviation law, sovereign immunity, international trade, and civil procedure. His most recent work was a comprehensive treatise on International Economic Law. An avid supporter...
12.06.14 | |

17 Sep

...which the court reserved on ways in which it might be curtailed still further – in passing, the court noted but declined to take a view on whether the ATS might have no extraterritorial application, limiting it to conduct within the United States. Once corporations were understood as targets, once everyone understood that neither plaintiff nor defendant required any traditional connection to the United States, as parties, in conduct, nothing, and once the plaintiffs bar saw opportunities to join forces with the NGOs and activists, the trend of the ATS...
17.09.10 | |

08 Feb

...of State is taking place this Thursday, February 12th, 2015 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM US Eastern Standard Time. This year’s theme is: “The Role of the Law in the Fight Against ISIL: Use of Force, Sanctions, and Foreign Terrorist Fighters.” The Section of International Law is pleased to announce the fifth annual non-CLE webcast with the Office of the Legal Adviser from the Jacob Burns Moot Courtroom of the George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C. Cosponsored by the American Society of International Law, the George Washington University...
08.02.15 | |

24 Jan

...offer a broader basis for jurisdiction (i.e. prosecution of extraterritorial acts), curtail the applicability of statutes of limitation or extend the prospects for cooperation and judicial assistance. Moreover, in practice, domestic and international crime labels are de facto often interrelated in a domestic setting. Many jurisdictions rely on a mix of ‘international’ and ‘ordinary crime’ definitions in order to try offences, or adjust modes of liability to capture the conduct in question. These factors are not taken into account in the Heller’s ‘cost-benefit’ analysis. Paradoxically, in existing practice, ‘ordinary crime’...
24.01.12 | |

08 May

...The question thus is whether the Supreme Court’s affirmance constituted a dismissal for lack of SMJ, or instead was a dismissal on the merits. Contextual clues in the Chief Justice’s opinion—in particular, the application of the presumption against extraterritoriality (PAE)—indicate that the Court went beyond the issue of SMJ and reached aspects of the merits. The Court concluded that “[o]n these facts,” the PAE barred relief in this case. There are certain limited circumstances in which a federal court may dismiss on the basis of threshold issues before ascertaining its...
08.05.13 | |

26 Mar

...the context of NIAC, Article 42 detention authority even in the more constrained context of IAC is dramatically limited, permitting only that detention as is “absolutely necessary” for the security of the detaining power. Is it “absolutely necessary” for the security of the United States that it be able to detain terrorist suspects picked up anywhere in the world under a legal authority that goes beyond its own sweepingly extraterritorial and often preventively focused criminal law? Guess we’ll find out if the administration advances the Art. 42 theory in court....
26.03.09 | |

22 Jul

...the exercise of well recognized forms of extraterritorial jurisdiction, sometimes notwithstanding treaty obligations to enable themselves so to act. National legislation may be illuminating as to the issue of universal jurisdiction, but not conclusive as to its legality. Moreover, while none of the national case law to which we have referred happens to be based on the exercise of a universal jurisdiction properly so called, there is equally nothing in this case law which evidences an opinio juris on the illegality of such a jurisdiction. In short, national legislation and...
22.07.09 | |

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 | |