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Search: self-defense

23 May

...and beaches lie on occupied land, within a territory marked by ongoing military hostilities. Western Sahara – a former Spanish colony listed as a Non-Self-Governing Territory since 1963 – has been the subject of competing claims by Morocco and Mauritania, who were largely motivated by its phosphate wealth, and the Algeria-backed national liberation movement “Polisario Front”. On 16 October 1975, the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s Advisory Opinion on Western Sahara determined that the status of Western Sahara should be decided through the self-determination of the Indigenous Sahrawi people. In...
23.05.25 | |

22 Jan

I have a new paper up on SSRN, appearing shortly in the Wayne Law Review, The Assumptions Behind the Assumptions in the War on Terror: Risk Assessment as an Example of Foundational Disagreement in Counterterrorism Policy. Here is the abstract from SSRN, with apologies from the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion: This 2007 article (based around an invited conference talk at Wayne State in early 2007) addresses risk assessment and cost benefit analysis as mechanisms in counterterrorism policy. It argues that although policy is often best pursued by agreeing to set...
22.01.09 | |

19 Feb

...of the key language includes the following from the preamble: Reaffirming the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the other States of the region, as set out in the Helsinki Final Act and annex 2, Reaffirming the call in previous resolutions for substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo, Moreover, the operative paragraphs include the following: The Security Council… 1. Decides that a political solution to the Kosovo crisis shall be based on the general principles in annex...
19.02.08 | |

17 Mar

...larger call for de-centering the dominant modes of doing international law research – whether that be the discipline’s epistemological limitations, english-centrism, cultural flattening, or teaching, to name a few. All of these conversations point to the structural asymmetries within the discipline which claims itself to be universal and yet, erases any semblance of the ‘other’.   It makes sense, then, as a small act of rebellion for Global North scholars to pursue conversations in a different epistemic register; one that is considerably removed from the discipline’s principal locations of influence and...
17.03.22 | |

24 Jun

...charges which made it difficult for the defendants to prepare their case and the inability of the defense to call witnesses who feared for their security. Proceedings in the Anfal trial closed on May 10, 2007 and a verdict will be issued soon. The prosecutor has called for the death penalty to be imposed on five of the six defendants. “The court undercut the accused’s right to present a vigorous defense by allowing the prosecution to rely on vague charges and refusing requests to accommodate defense witnesses,” said Dicker. “This...
24.06.07 | |

11 Apr

Pierre N. Leval, a well-respected judge who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, has published a full-scale no-holds-barred policy defense of the Alien Tort Statute in Foreign Affairs. The essay, which is adapted from his lecture to the New York City Bar Association, offers the standard argument in favor of the Alien Tort Statute (it gives victims of human rights atrocities the possibility of justice and compensation). And he offers a pre-rebuttal to a possibly negative ATS ruling from the U.S. Supreme...
11.04.13 | |

16 Apr

...the time that there was no legal justification for watering down American criminal law’s well-established “entrapment by estoppel” defense in the way that Lederman suggested and that Obama has now endorsed. Here is what I wrote regarding Lederman’s claim that we can infer reasonable reliance from the existence of the OLC’s advice itself (which directly contradicts his insistence that waterboarding is patently illegal): I think Lederman’s argument misunderstands the nature of “entrapment by estoppel.” Section 2.04 of the Model Penal Code provides a typical formulation of the defense: [a] belief...
16.04.09 | |

21 Nov

James Comey and Jack Goldsmith provide here the best (although not completely convincing) defense of the decision to try KSM in New York. I agree that the most defensible explanation is that military commissions remain constitutionally vulnerable, hence it makes sense to use the civilian courts for your most important cases. I don’t quite buy this, but I think this is the most sensible explanation of what seems otherwise a totally baffling decision....
21.11.09 | |

02 Oct

...Arabs to live together. Partitioning the territory was the only way out. Mihai Martoiu Ticu "In December 1917, when the British Army occupied Palestine, the Arabs could not independently invoke a right of self-determination in general international law even though they had long been numerically preponderant in Palestine, owning most of the land, and even reaching high political office under the Turks. This is because at that time self-determination was, at best, a political principle. It did not exist as an independent legal right, which all peoples could invoke. However,...
02.10.11 | |

04 May

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Medellin v. Texas that rulings of the International Court of Justice are not “self-executing” under U.S. law. For this reason, the Supreme Court refused to require Texas to stop executions that the ICJ had held in violation of U.S. treaty obligations. It looks like Colombia’s Constitutional Court has followed that same approach with respect to Colombia’s Constitution: Colombia’s constitutional court ruled on Friday that applying a decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that granted Nicaragua a disputed area of Caribbean...
04.05.14 | |

18 Nov

...makes more sense” (in War Crimes and Just War, 2007: 310). Here’s why: at least insofar as we’re dealing with al-Qa‘ida militants, preference for the war model has perverse even if unintended effects, owing to the militant’s collective self-description or self-understanding as jihadists within the Islamic tradition. The Islamic legal tradition (of Shari’ah and fiqh), which admittedly is no longer as intellectually vigorous and relevant in the manner it once was in the Islamic world, understands (the ‘lesser’) jihad (the ‘greater’ jihad of course being the personal struggle against evil...
18.11.09 | |

30 Nov

First of all, I want to thank Chris, Peggy, Julian and Roger for letting me spend some time here at Opinio Juris. As an avid reader, I’m looking forward to the opportunity to exchange ideas with other Opinio Juris readers. To that end, I want to start off with a question about judicial treatment of non-self-executing treaties. U.S. courts have certainly devoted considerable (albeit often inconsistent) attention to the question of when to enforce a U.S. treaty by declaring it “self-executing” or “non-self-executing.” But the inquiry always seems to end...
30.11.05 | |