Search: extraterritorial sanctions
18 Feb Constitutional Right, No Gitmo Remedy
...over who crosses U.S. borders, it’s not for the courts to decide otherwise absent some very clear authorization. So “what law authorized the district court to order the government to bring petitioners to the United States and release them here?” Not the Due Process Clause, says the D.C. Circuit. Immigration cases have always held that the Constitution doesn’t extend to non-citizens held beyond the “sovereign territory” of the United States. (Never mind, I suppose, that Justice Kennedy’s Boumediene majority no longer thinks sovereignty is the touchstone for the extraterritorial extension...
20 Apr From Brownlie to Brandom: Recollective Stories of the Right of Self-Defense and a Theory of the Pragmatic Semantics of Legal Conceptual Change
...posed by the armed group and individual members, but necessity and proportionality can have a concertina-like quality – at times focusing on the threat posed by particular individuals, and at other times encompassing the overall animus of the armed group, its hostile intentions, and its general capacity to continue to act. This set of propositions supports the preventive, extraterritorial, use of lethal force against individuals and non-state groups, with a geographically and temporally expansive scope. This permissive version of self-defense is neither lex lata nor even de lege ferenda, but...05 Jun Targeted Killings Symposium: John C. Dehn on Richard Meyer and Col. Maxwell on Status-Based Targeting
...application) international law that attempts to delineate the circumstances under which terrorist violence might become “hostilities” in a NIAC. Meyer senses this problem, classifies it as a “jus ad bellum” issue, but then characterizes it as a “collective political decision” rather than a legal issue (effectively extracting most of the jus from the jus ad bellum). The decision to attack an extraterritorial non-state organized armed group is probably a political question under the framework of the U.S. Constitution, but is not so from the perspective of international humanitarian and human...02 Nov U.S. Court Convicts “Chucky” Taylor of Torture
“Chucky” Taylor, son of former Liberian President (and current war crimes defendant) Charles Taylor, was convicted Friday in Florida federal court of committing torture when he was with his father in Liberia. What makes Taylor’s conviction news (although only news overseas, apparently, since it didn’t make any of the leading U.S. newspapers) is that it is the first conviction under the 1994 Extraterritorial Torture Statute, 18 U.S.C. 234 and 2340A, which was enacted to implement U.S. obligations under the Convention Against Torture (for an interesting profile of Chucky in Rolling...24 May The US’s Retreat from IHL (or, the Triumph of Ryan Goodman)
...— it’s unclear from the fact sheet — its new understanding of the use of lethal force applies only to the current conflict. Second, although I don’t imagine that the US much cares, the jus ad bellum-like targeting standards announced in the fact sheet do not necessarily satisfy the limitations on lethal force imposed by international human rights law. As I have pointed out ad nauseum on the blog (see here for an example), whether an extraterritorial use of force is legitimate under the jus ad bellum says nothing about...23 Jul Emerging Voices: Responsibility of the Netherlands for the Genocide in Srebrenica–The Nuhanović and Mothers of Srebrenica Cases Compared
...ground. It implicitly distinguished a de jure and de facto basis of extraterritorial jurisdiction. The Netherlands formally (de jure) had jurisdiction because the territorial entity, the State of Bosnia-Herzegovina, had basically surrendered its competence to govern in the area to the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). Clearly, UNPROFOR cannot be equated with the State of the Netherlands, but considering the Supreme Court’s answer to the attribution question (see above), this was nonetheless relevant. The Netherlands also had de facto jurisdiction, because an examination of the facts had shown that it...20 Oct YJIL Symposium: Response to Mark Wu
...Article XIV will prove a major hurdle to liberalization of trade in services conducted electronically. Article XIV allows countries to derogate from their liberalization obligations if necessary to protect public morals or the public order. This escape valve seems a wise measure to prevent the imposition of sanctions in cases where a particular trade liberalization would imperil domestic morals or domestic order. The proponents of GATS recognized, however, that claims of public morals or public order might be used to disguise protectionist regulation, and thus the WTO properly limited the...
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...09 Apr Federal District Court Rules on Torture Allegations
...each make clear that the Constitution’s reach is not so expansive that it encompasses these nonresident aliens who were injured extraterritorially while detained by the military in foreign countries where the United States is engaged in wars.” After reviewing these decisions, the Court concluded that “it is considered settled law that nonresident aliens must be within the sovereign territory of the United States to stake any claim to the rights secured by the Fifth Amendment.” And as for Eighth Amendment claims, the Court ruled that “even assuming the Eighth Amendment...