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Search: jens iverson

14 Feb

Cross-posted at LieberCode. David Rieff has an interesting – and somewhat polemical – article in the latest Foreign Policy. Rieff, you will recall, was an early supporter of intervention, a policy position no doubt influenced by his time spent in Bosnia which culminated in Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. Although initially hawkish on intervention, and willing to support liberal interventionism in Iraq, Rieff had a change of heart after the Iraq war failed to achieve any liberal goals. Not only did Rieff renounce the Iraq...
14.02.12 | |

25 Jun

I met Mike Lewis during my first year of law teaching at Cornell Law School. Mike was scheduled to give a lecture at the law school about torture and I was invited to give a commentary on his presentation. Mike had pre-circulated the paper that the presentation was based on. I disagreed with his thesis and pressed him sharply on its details during the event. His thesis had the virtue of proposing a very workable standard for defining torture, but I felt it yielded counter-intuitive results for particular...
25.06.15 | |

17 Mar

...proposed applying the justificatory theory to examine decisionmaking by actors that lack formal power in international decisionmaking, but still play an important role in it. Referring to the comments by Ralph Wilde and Rob Howse, she added that these actors might challenge the understanding of which values are considered “universal”. Tai-Heng Cheng’s response, which includes references to some of his other research, can be found here. On Wednesday, Kevin Heller reported on the ICC’s landmark first judgment in the Lubanga case. Jens Ohlin and Kevin Heller posted on the relevance...
17.03.12 | |

13 Apr

...of their effectiveness and legitimacy. Ruti Teitel suggested to open up the question of legitimacy. The authors’ response can be found here. The second article in the symposium was by Darryl Robinson, entitled A Cosmopolitan Liberal Account of International Criminal Law. Jens Ohlin commented how the article had made him take a step back. Mark Drumbl raised points on moral agency and how ICL can understate responsibility in mass atrocity. Darryl’s response is here. Another series of guest posts was by Jonathan Horowitz and Naz Modirzadeh who provided two posts...
13.04.13 | |

07 Mar

This fortnight on Opinio Juris, Kristen discussed the Elders Proposal for Strengthening the UN and its proposals to change the selection process for the position of the Secretary-General Jens pointed out how the end of an armed conflict can be as legally complex as its start, and wrote about the proposed CIA reorganisation. Patryk Labuda contributed a guest post on hybrid justice in Africa Julian asked whether Japan will embrace the ‘illegal but legitimate view of the UN Charter’s limits on the use of force. He also wondered whether the...
07.03.15 | |

06 Mar

Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times says that John Brennan has proposed a major reorganization of the CIA that will, to a large extent, break down the deep bureaucratic divide between agency analysts and clandestine operatives. Historically, analysts engage in research and, as their name suggests, intelligence analysis. Some of that was obscure and abstract–for example writing reports on the political situation in a country and the likelihood that a particular head of state might be deposed. But other aspects of that research might be of more...
06.03.15 | |

24 Jul

...Colonel David Wallace on the combatant status of “little green men,” Geoff Corn on regulating non-international armed conflicts after Tadic, and Opinio Juris’s Jens Ohlin on legitimate self-defense. I was also one of the workshop participants and my paper, Law, Rhetoric, Strategy: Russia and Self-Determination Before and After Crimea, considers how and why Russia has used international legal arguments concerning self-determination in relation to its intervention in Ukraine. I address the question “of what use is legal rhetoric in the midst of politico-military conflict” by reviewing the laws of self-determination...
24.07.15 | |

28 Sep

...update, or repeal the 2001 AUMF and to clarify the basis for its action against ISIL and other terrorist groups that did not take part in the September 11th attacks – and in many cases did not even exist at the time of the attacks. See for instance Jens David Ohlin here, Deborah Pearlstein here, Peter Spiro here, Jack Goldsmith here, and Jennifer Daskal here. While both Sales and Daskal expressed concerned with the current legal framework dealing with terrorist threats in the United States, their opinion differed as to...
28.09.14 | |

04 Oct

...challenge to orthodox thinking on the purview of international criminal law is presented by recent debates on the potential criminal responsibility of al-Shabab in instigating and prolonging the Somali famine. Numerous commentators have questioned how it is possible that, despite making the suffering of starving victims a matter of policy, al-Shabab’s actions are not considered criminal. David Jens Ohlin, for example, notes that: “the right to food is a universally recognized human right. Therefore, the argument goes, if people are dying from a lack of food and potable water, somebody...
04.10.11 | |

24 Jul

In two decisions (here and here) handed down this morning, the European Court of Human Rights has found that Poland violated its obligations under the European Convention of Human Rights for its complicity in the United States’ running of a CIA black site and high-value detainees program on Polish territory. One of the cases involved al-Nashiri, who was prosecuted before a U.S. military commission and the subject of protracted habeas litigation in the DC Circuit. He was accused of orchestrating the attack against the USS Cole in 2000....
24.07.14 | |

09 Mar

The so-called “doomsday” seed vault opened recently in Norway. It’s a remarkable venture — and an even more remarkable piece of engineering: “This is a frozen Garden of Eden,” European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said at the opening ceremony Tuesday, as guests carried the first seed deposits into the icy vault, deep within an Arctic mountain in the remote Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. “It is the Noah’s Ark for securing biological diversity for future generations,” said Norway’s Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg. Svalbard Global Seed Vault, just 1,000 kilometers (620...
09.03.08 | |

22 Oct

...in cases before the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, international arbitral tribunals, WTO and NAFTA Dispute Settlement Panels as well as cases in England and the United States of America. There are four scholars who write in my areas that I am afraid to disagree with — because when we do disagree, odds are that they are right and I am wrong. The first three are Marko Milanovic, Steve Vladeck, and my co-blogger Jens Ohlin. The fourth is Dapo. He is, quite...
22.10.14 | |