Search: extraterritorial sanctions
14 May Brookings Conference on Legislating Counterterrorism
...for going after terrorists themselves. But even as the administration wants to expand the reach of the strategy, the legal space for it threatens to shrink. And it is not especially clear that the administration understands that acceptance of certain things that parts of its foreign policy advisors would like to do – accept extraterritorial application of the ICCPR, for example – would have potentially grave effects on the legal rationales it offers for its targeted killing strategies. I see it as a potential clash within the Obama administration’s foreign...
06 Sep Once Again: Drone Killings and International Law
...actors (BVerfG, 2 BvE 2/16, paras. 50–51). At any rate, such extraterritorial operations may constitute a violation of the sovereignty of the State of sojourn. If this State – for example, Afghanistan (now represented by the Taliban) – did not consent to such an attack, the strike would constitute a violation of the principle of non-intervention derived from the principle of the sovereign equality of States (Article 2(1) UN Charter) (cf. ICJ, Nicaragua Judg. 1986, para. 202); it could also amount to a violation of the prohibition of the use...11 Jul A Canal Runs Through It
...the plaintiffs. But the court isn’t buying it. It finds that the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) doesn’t protect foreign harms, including Mexican seepage wetlands just south of the border. Statutes don’t normally have extraterritorial application and there’s nothing in NEPA to suggest Congress wanted to protect these foreign environmental harms. Okay, that argument didn’t hold water, so the plaintiffs try for trans-boundary harm. Harms in Mexico will have trans-boundary harms in the United States. Like what? Well, the loss of seepage in Mexico will reduce crop importation to the...21 Nov The Ninth Circuit’s Muddled Comity Analysis in Mujica
Last week the Ninth Circuit issued a controversial opinion in Mujica v. Airscan, Inc., that sharply limits the scope of human rights litigation. The claims in Mujica arose in Colombia and allegedly implicate corporate collusion with the Colombian military. Following Kiobel the common consensus was that Alien Tort Statute litigation would be severely curtailed based on the presumption against extraterritoriality. Not surprisingly, the Ninth Circuit rejected the Plaintiffs’ claims, finding that where the only connection to the United States was the Defendants’ nationality, the claims do not “touch and concern”...01 May A Return to “Diplomatic Asylum”?
...NGO activities in Egypt before being allowed to leave the country. I had always thought “diplomatic asylum” something of a misnomer, as often paired with the common misunderstanding that embassy premises are extraterritorial (as in, that the US embassy in Beijing counts as US territory, which in fact it doesn’t). Turns out that the term has some historical traction, even though the its operation now appears to turn on the inviolability of diplomatic premises under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and not any distinctive legal doctrine. Much of that...
16 Oct The Trump Administration and International Law: A Reply
...from the inside I “actually advised the Obama administration to change its interpretation and to recognize the extraterritorial application of the ICCPR;” I then argued with greater success both internally and externally for the view that the Convention Against Torture applies extraterritorially, a view that the Obama administration eventually adopted after I left. Given Eviatar’s recognition that I fought internally—with admittedly mixed success—for the United States to actually comply with international human rights law, I am bit puzzled by her suggestion that “prominent lawyers and legal scholars like [my]self could...
05 Jun Beyond Borders, Beyond Rights? The U.S. “Staging Expulsion” Policy and the Future of Externalization
...fear for their life. These evolving extraterritorial control mechanisms raise profound questions about the circumvention of established protection frameworks that have traditionally governed asylum policy. A Continuum of Externalization To understand the significance of this new “staging expulsion” model in the U.S., we must place it within a broader trend in migration governance: the externalization of migration control. Externalization refers to policies by which countries like the U.S., Australia or EU countries shift their migration enforcement responsibilities onto third countries – often in exchange for financial support, visa waivers or...
15 Jul Symposium on PMSCs: When Surveillance Goes Private
...how India, Honduras, and Switzerland have introduced laws with an extraterritorial reach that clarify these states’ responsibilities for overseeing private security operations abroad. Finally, data protection principles and legislation are particularly relevant in controlling the data processing activities of PMSCs. Over 130 countries around the world have introduced data protection and privacy legislation that would be directly applicable to the companies operating in their jurisdiction. Also, the Council of Europe Convention 108 – officially titled ‘Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data’ –...
23 Jun Fantastical Opinio Juris and How to Find It
...statements therein made) to opine on whether the practice of extraterritorial self-defense against non-State actors absent consent of the territorial State was permitted or not by article 51 of the UNC. In prospecting for opinio juris a richer vein could not be found: States used legal justificatory discourse, expressed their own legal views, and weren’t coy on articulating what they thought was the definitive meaning, extent, and significance on the customary rules purportedly expanding (or not) self-defense. This seems to be the indicative of certainty about the articulation of legality...
05 Sep Iran’s Threat of Retaliation
...international efforts focus primarily on preventing the effects of such threats, rather than on addressing the threats themselves or sanctioning them. There may be an implicit understanding that deviates from the stricter conclusions of the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion. Specifically, the threat of force in response to the extrajudicial and extraterritorial killing of a high-ranking individual within domestic settings (even if they are considered leaders of terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US and the EU) might be viewed as a proportionate...