Search: extraterritorial sanctions

...Times, that Koh, as State Department Legal Advisor in 2010, actually advised the Obama administration to change its interpretation and to recognize the extraterritorial application of the ICCPR. He noted that the 1995 Interpretation has been questioned by the International Court of Justice, the Human Rights Committee, and some of our closest allies, many academics, human rights experts and NGO commentators. “It also stands in tension with the recognition by regional human rights bodies of extraterritorial obligations under other human rights instruments,” he wrote. Koh continued: In my view, the...

...prohibitions, many countries have taken steps to make sanctions evasion a crime in of itself. Germany has amended its Sanctions Enforcement Act to allow for the prosecution of any sanctioned person who fails to declare their assets in Germany to the German authorities. United Kingdom lawmakers introduced the Economic Crime Act which would provide the government with the authority to levy civil penalties against sanctions violators on a strict liability basis. The European Union has also proposed that all of its Member States take a uniform approach to criminalizing the...

Last week, 45 Fijian peacekeepers deployed as part of a 1,200-member U.N. force monitoring a buffer zone between Syria and Israel were captured and are being held by Nusra Front rebels. (Hat tip to Theodore Christakis here at the ESIL conference in Vienna for raising the issue yesterday in the ESIL / SHARES Peace and Security Interest Group Seminar.) Rebels have made three demands for their release, according to a WSJ article published yesterday: 1. They want to be dropped from the list of al Qaeda-linked groups under U.N. sanctions;...

...Fietta. This seminar will be chaired by Mr Peter Flint, Consultant at Volterra Fietta. February 3 Panel event: The Folly of US Sanctions against the ICC: Since the inception of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998, the United States has had both hostile and cooperative relations with the ICC. The outgoing U.S. administration took hostility to a new level, imposing legal sanctions on the Court’s high-level officials in the same way the government imposes civil and criminal sanctions against those who provide material support to terrorists. This panel will...

The UN Security Council passed Resolution 1672 yesterday, imposing sanctions yesterday on four Sudanese considered responsible for the the atrocities in Darfur. The Resolution passed 12-0, with China, Russia and Qatar abstaining on the ground that sanctions would disrupt the reconciliation process. The sanctioned individuals are Major General Gaffar Mohamed Elhassan, commander of the Western Military Region for the Sudanese Armed Forces; Sheik Musa Hilal, paramount chief of the Jalul Tribe in North Darfur; Adam Yacub Shant, a commander in the Sudanese Liberation Army , and Gabril Abdul Kareem Badri,...

...breaches of erga omnes norms. The sanctions against Russia to which you refer, for instance, are quite evidently inspired by such a breach of an erga omnes norm (Article 2(4) UNCh)... There is moreover another relevant difference between the sanctions against Russia and the US 'embargo' against Cuba, in that the latter sanctions regime envisages so-called 'secondary sanctions' that sit uneasily with international law principles governing the exercise of jurisdiction. (ps: of course the annual UNGA resolutions are an expression of State practice/opinio juris) Jordan And Tom, see our Arab...

of the President. Congress could also amend IEEPA to give itself more control over the exercise of presidential discretion in imposing sanctions. But no such bill has been proposed. Instead, Congress appears to be one of the biggest fans of the executive use of IEEPA to declare emergencies and impose sanctions and seems to wish it were used even more often. As discussed in the article, U.S. courts also provide no meaningful check on the use of IEEPA-authorized sanctions programs like E.O. 13,382. Under every possible legal theory for challenge,...

particularly strong form of legal imperialism. In some ways then, extraterritoriality in the human rights field seems at its least interesting when discussing the extraterritorial application of treaties. But the topic is a window to a much more touchy topic tied to attempts to promote a new legal orthodoxy that fundamentally refashions international law. My last observation relates to a claim that Marko makes about the reason that issues of extraterritoriality have come to the fore now – a topic that Kal raises in his post too. Marko implies that...

...respect of its entire territory.” In fact, this provision and the presumption of the territorial application of treaties appeared to be so commonsensical that some states proposed deleting it from the ILC’s draft articles on the Law of Treaties. Therefore, in order for a treaty to generate extraterritorial obligations it must be shown that either the treaty includes explicit language to that effect or that the treaty’s object and purpose, context, and travaux préparatoires warrant interpreting the treaty as generating extraterritorial obligations. Moreover, since the conclusion of the Genocide Convention,...

...Portugal and 32 other Council of Europe states. In respect of the latter, their claim was necessarily extraterritorial. While their standing was denied for the reasons outlined above, their bid to expand the Court’s extraterritorial jurisdiction was also rejected.  Under the Convention, the term jurisdiction defines the area in which a State must protect, promote and respect human rights (art. 1). This is usually confined to national borders. The ECtHR has accepted extraterritorial application of the Convention if States hold “effective control over a foreign territory”, or State agents have...

...fix the shortcomings of mutual legal assistance treaties. As Professor Tonya Putnam’s recent book and research show, in the past when courts have rejected government arguments for extending domestic statutes extraterritorially, those refusals have helped fuel U.S. multilateral or bilateral engagement. In contrast, rulings that permits unilateral extraterritorial action create environments where there’s little urgency for the U.S. to find coordinated solutions. The most common result is free-for-alls, where each nation relies on its own piece-meal approach. Not surprisingly then, the reciprocity problem—that other nations would unilaterally try to seize...

jurisdiction over, and to reject a judicially imposed presumption against extraterritoriality to, piracy on foreign ships (which, again, were considered the territories of foreign nations). The ATS contains this same invocation of “the law of nations,” which comprises both substantive and jurisdictional components. That ought to be enough to dispose of the presumption given this precedent. It is also worth mentioning that the Kiobel Court’s assurances that Congress would have included a “clear indication of extraterritoriality” had it wanted the ATS to apply to causes of action arising abroad simply...