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Search: self-defense

11 Nov

...secession would have clashed with a cornerstone of the UN, the territorial integrity of states. Outside of the context of decolonization, the right of self-determination for communities that are within already existing states is understood as a right to “internal” self-determination: the pursuit of political, cultural, linguistic, and other rights within the existing state (in this case, the U.S.). However, secession is not in and of itself illegal under international law (although it may be linked to an act that is breach in international law, such as a military intervention...
11.11.16 | |

10 Dec

...have to say: ‘That is true. And I admire your self-confidence.’ But I also think that this self-confidence is part of the problem – because it is an unwarranted self-confidence. It is the cause not only of why so many people in the world suffer, but also why so many people have lost faith in managerial expertise. The problem is this: most people meet experts – such as myself – when they are asked to give solutions to the problems of the world. The expert will then have a 35...
10.12.18 | |

09 Oct

...and which I – very selfishly – would enjoy elaborating on (after all, legal blogging is a structurally and emotionally selfish exercise). First, both Francesco and Michael seem to regret the overly pessimistic light cast by the paper on the current state of the profession and my alleged lamenting of the foundering of a profession that spends too much time varnishing and polishing its nails in a beauty salon. As indicated above, this editorial was solely meant to buoy self-reflection by drawing the attention to some growing habits which we...
09.10.12 | |

08 Dec

...Christopher Le Mon’s excellent article on very similar issues ‘Unilateral intervention in Civil Wars: The Effective Control Test Tested’ (2003) International Law and Politics 741. Jordan Turkey has already engaged in limited self-defense targetings inside Syria in response to Syrian armed attacks -- and to my mind, that triggers a de facto and de jure international armed conflict and the law of war paradigm as well as the self-defense paradigm. During an international armed conflict, at least, the chemical and biological weapons are a legitimate military target. Points made in...
08.12.12 | |

27 Sep

...interdependent military is capable of providing institutional support to a nascent democracy because its institutional self-interests often align with the conditions that Madison and others have identified as conducive to the genesis of a constitutional democracy: institutional stability, political pluralism, and national unity. Using comparative case studies, I explore how the interdependent militaries’ self-interested actions have counter-intuitively promoted democratic development and constrained unilateral exercises of power in emerging democracies, which Professor Landau has persuasively argued is the central challenge of constitution-making in a separate article titled Constitution-Making Gone Wrong, Ala....
27.09.12 | |

16 Feb

...be found in rehabilitation, reconciliation and the last resort principle. Regarding the limits, some contribution can be found in both comparative criminal law and transitional justice. In these, for instance, we could also find an answer to our starting point: The discussion on self-pardon. Departing from the ‘bad examples’ of the self-amnesties adopted by Pinochet (law decree n. 2191/1978) and Fujimori (law 2647/1995) and before them by Mussolini, right after the coup which brought him to power (Royal Decree 1641/1922), the vast majority of scholars rejects the admissibility of self-clemency...
16.02.21 | |

25 Jul

...argue that there is an obligation on states irrespective of self-interest, potentially even when it is contrary to self-interest. A possible source of such a (non-self-interested) obligation can be identified: the UK, we might say, is under (at least) a moral obligation to implement judgments of the Court of Human Rights because we have (at least) implicitly promised to do so when we joined the Convention system, and violating that promise is, at least prima facie, morally wrong. (It also threatens to undermine our expectation that others will consider themselves...
25.07.13 | |

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 | |

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 | |

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 | |

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 | |

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 | |