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Search: extraterritorial sanctions

07 Mar

...carefully choreographed mantra on three points: first, recognition of the pro-Russian separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk is unacceptable and involves a grave violation of international law; second, if Russia invades Ukraine it will have to face severe sanctions; and third, leaving aside the delivery of weapons and other support, NATO and western States will not participate militarily in a Russian-Ukrainian conflict. A number of legal and political issues arise with respect to these positions, and this contribution will zoom in on the last issue. Since the start of the...
07.03.22 | |

15 Oct

[Kristina Daugirdas is a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School.] Absent a contractual relationship, individuals who have been harmed by the acts of international organizations rarely have access to institutions to hear their claims. National courts are often unavailable on account of organizations’ immunities. Some organizations have established alternative mechanisms to resolve such claims. The World Bank Inspection Panel is one example; the Ombudsperson for the ISIL and Al-Qaida UN Security Council Sanctions regime is another. Such accountability mechanisms must be deliberately designed, adopted, and implemented....
15.10.19 | |

15 Jul

...food, health, etc.), represents the Council’s most effective system for independent human rights monitoring. In 2010, in the context of major discussions about the future of the Council, the same group of governments proposed the establishment of a Legal Committee to enforce compliance with the Code through sanctions. Other governments, the SRs themselves, and civil society groups have been highly critical of the way the Code has been used so far to stifle the work of the monitors and are strongly opposed to the creation of any compliance mechanism. In...
15.07.11 | |

23 Mar

...student ponders why Argentina wasn’t bailed out like banks were in 2008 or Credit Suisse is today. Was a state of 50 million not too big to fail? Are odious debt and economic sanctions not also expressions of unlawful force? They quote Special Rapporteur Alena Douhan favourably; what’s the point of UN mechanisms if Euro-America can deploy international law with tactical impunity? A final student asks about the status of Palestine. If it declares itself a state, if 140 states recognise it as a state, is it not a state?...
23.03.23 | |

24 Jul

...of all three legal regimes: to prevent human beings from suffering harm caused by acts considered to be the worst of the worst across the globe. Whether it entails prosecuting a war criminal or economic sanctions aimed at a State, the goal is the same, nonetheless. In my view, the divergence across the various enforcement bodies should be a question of degree of punishment, rather than the need for varying definitions of gravity across the different arenas of public international law. Admittedly, the malleability of gravity can be useful when...
24.07.20 | |

27 Oct

...oversight to be expanded to more than a dozen other U.N. Security Council sanctions regimes to ensure fair process for the individuals and entities targeted. The chief U.N. investigator into human rights cases in North Korea said on Wednesday he has appealed to China to support calls to refer Pyongyang’s actions to The Hague on suspicion of crimes against humanity. The death toll from the Ebola epidemic has risen to 4,922 out of 10,141 recorded infections, with three West African countries accounting for most of the cases through October 23,...
27.10.14 | |

13 Feb

...day to eventually get rid of their nuclear program. Additionally, the U.S. and North Korea will start on bilateral talks aimed at restarting diplomatic relations and, probably, some sort of peace treaty aimed at ending the Korean War (remember that war?). Does the U.S. Congress get to weigh in? Not on the agreement itself, but since the U.S. has also promised to begin removing North Korea from its designation as a terror-sponsoring state list and also on ending U.S. trade sanctions, Congress will get to have their say, I’m sure....
13.02.07 | |

21 May

...cyberespionage by its military (based on the argument that such activity is not commercial in nature), then denying conduct-based immunity to Chinese officials for the same acts would reinforce the disjunction between foreign state immunity and foreign official immunity in U.S. courts. At a broader level, the announcement of indictments against named Chinese officials reinforces a trend towards focusing pressure on individuals associated with undesirable state policies, whether through immigration enforcement or targeted sanctions. The full implications of this trend for international law and international relations remain to be seen....
21.05.14 | |

05 Apr

...believe international law does not constrain covert operations, at least from the perspective of U.S. domestic law. First, we must remember that Title 50 operations may be authorized as an integral part of an armed conflict or in the absence of one. Thus, IHL may or may not be triggered and apply to a covert operation or program, and IHRL would apply only to the extent one accepts (contrary to long held official U.S. views) that IHRL applies to a nation's extraterritorial actions. Regardless of whether either body of international...
05.04.13 | |

04 May

...armed attacks by non-state actors not amounting to armed conflict -- to be governed by human rights law, particularly extraterritorially. In such cases, states may observe IHL as a matter of policy or by analogy but had no requirement to do so as a matter of law. This, I think, is Jordan Paust's position, and somewhat reflects the U.S. position (depending, perhaps, upon the administration). While I respect Kevin immensely, he frequently argues, without citation, that no European country views the law this way. Absent a thorough study, I can't...
04.05.11 | |

18 Apr

...the plaintiffs to re-file their complaints against the US defendants to overcome the new Kiobel extraterritoriality presumption. This means that she is willing to explore in greater detail the Kiobel requirement that plaintiffs’ claims “touch and concern” the territory of the U.S. with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritoriality. Will knowledge by the US parent of the subsidiaries’ activities in South Africa be enough? Will receiving profits from the subsidiaries be enough? I assume that is the best the plaintiffs will be able to plead is knowledge by...
18.04.14 | |

25 May

...(if, in my view, unfortunate) position that ICCPR doesn’t apply extraterritorially (which the report acknowledges), this seems a bit of a tough legal case to make. Beyond the trial situation (to which it seems CA3 would surely apply), as long as we’re choosing between legal regimes the United States officially rejects, why not pick APII, or API by analogy, as the more useful standard? Truly asking here. Finally (for now, I’m still catching up), former State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger and his former State Department colleague (and soon-to-be Vanderbilt...
25.05.11 | |