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Search: extraterritorial sanctions

03 May

...whom the duty-bearers are, how obligations are allocated to those duty-bearers, and how responsibility for violations is assigned. The Current Paradigm In human rights law, a territorial-state-centric paradigm prevails. Human rights obligations are incumbent on the state on whose territory an individual or group find themselves on. This is often captured by the notion ‘territorial jurisdiction’. The default position is that a state has human rights obligations if and when it exercises territorial jurisdiction. Very exceptionally, and almost grudgingly, exceptions to territorial jurisdiction have been accepted. Such extraterritorial jurisdiction has...
03.05.24 | |

02 Mar

whether the ICCPR applied to the events of 11 October. It is this question that I discuss here. The test for the extraterritorial application of the ICCPR There is an established jurisprudence that human rights treaties apply extraterritorially. Typically, this occurs when a State exercises jurisdiction abroad through effective control over territory, or  exercises power and authority over an individual (General Comment, No 31 § 10). In the traditional sense, this involved occupation of territory (“spatial model”) or exercise of physical authority over persons (“personal model”); however, human rights bodies...
02.03.21 | |

12 May

...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...
12.05.23 | and |

30 Jan

...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...
30.01.21 | |

04 Sep

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;...
04.09.14 | |

26 Apr

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,...
26.04.06 | |

01 Oct

...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...
01.10.15 | |

09 Jun

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,...
09.06.09 | |

18 Apr

...which are not subject to the ATS, providing only that where other claims “touch and concern the territory of the United States, they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application” (p.14). Despite initial appearances, the ATS has thus not definitively been interpreted to have no extraterritorial effect, but rather, it has only been interpreted as not extending extraterritorially in the circumstances of Kiobel – that is, to purely extraterritorial ‘foreign cubed’ cases. This is not a presumption against any extraterritoriality, but only a presumption...
18.04.13 | |

17 Apr

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...
17.04.13 | |

21 Dec

...So there. Let me try to explain why. Professor Besson’s main claim is that prior scholarship on the ECHR’s extraterritorial application, most of it very critical of the European Court’s case law, has not given serious thought to normative considerations that underpin the issue, ‘except for vague and often misleading gestures to the universality of human rights that allegedly requires their extraterritorial application.’ Generally speaking, in Besson’s view that scholarship is under-theorized and the vague references to universality fail to account for the relational nature of rights and obligations under...
21.12.12 | |

26 Feb

...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...
26.02.18 | |