Search: self-defense
27 Mar Cybersecurity at the WTO
...League Boycott against Israel–there has never been a case actually adjudicating the security exception. The reason is that Member States’s recognize that national security questions are self-judging. Each Member State decides for itself whether action is necessary for its essential security interests. Article XXI of GATT 1947 and Article XXIII of the Government Procurement Agreement both have such language. Baker focuses on the language in Article XXIII requiring that the procurement be “indispensable for national security or for national defence purposes.” But the operative language is that “[n]othing in this...
02 Oct The “Frozen” Conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh
...that the right to self-determination leads to secession outside of the colonial paradigm, or outside cases of extreme oppression. Instead, most authorities on self-determination would agree that the right needs to be exercised internally, through an autonomy regime within the confines of the existing parent state. Thus, the international community’s stance that Nagorno-Karabakh ought to remain a part of Azerbaijan, with some type of autonomous status, appears consistent with international law and most other precedents (except for Kosovo). Although the international community’s attitude vis-à-vis Nagorno-Karabakh appears rooted in international law,...10 Sep Samuel Moyn on the History of Human Rights and the Human Rights Movement
...a global perspective, the brief career of human rights in the 1940s is the story of how the Allied nations elevated language about human rights as they reneged on the earlier wartime promise—made in the 1941 Atlantic Charter—of the self-determination of peoples. Global self-determination would have spelled the end of empire, but by war’s end the Allies had come around to Winston Churchill’s clarification that this promise applied only to Hitler’s empire, not empire in general (and certainly not Churchill’s). The Atlantic Charter set the world on fire, but because...
17 Aug States of Justice Symposium: Interrogating States of Justice–The Politics of the International Criminal Court
states self-referring is mostly pre-occupied with motives of these states that scholars often miss the value of this developing state practice. As it is incontestable that states self-referral of cases amplifies the aims of the Rome Statute, to end impunity and activates the complementarity provisions under the statue as a cohesive unity of purpose between the ICC and its member states (Prosecutor v. Katanga and Chui and Prosecutor v. Lubanga). A weakness of the book, if any, is that while Ba focuses on the motives of Uganda’s Museveni, there is...
25 Aug Symposium on The Sentimental Life of International Law: On Lateness, Style and Sentiment
...effect and a very difficult one to achieve at that. This is a book that insists on its style, or the sylishness of is prose, and not only that, insists that we read this surface as the ‘thing itself’. And the style is, in turns, ironic, self-deprecating, cosmopolitan, wearing its hard earned learning lightly, self-aggrandizing. It is arch, self-conscious, always aware of the moves and counter-moves; how the game of the academic is played. And yet, also somehow gently nudging itself beyond the certainties of the doctinalist and the ironic...25 Jun Linos Book Symposium: Comments by Ryan Goodman
...support for a policy if foreign countries have adopted or global institutions have recommended the policy. Second, the data are based on self-reported levels of information. And, we can easily imagine that self-understanding and self-reporting of one’s own awareness of social policy is systematically skewed (e.g., in favor of reporting overconfidence generally, over- or under-reporting confidence among particular types of individuals). Third, cases in which low-information subjects responded more strongly may mask a spurious correlation. That is, another factor—e.g., lack of concern about the social policy—might lead both to individuals’...
20 Aug Muddying the Waters Still Further: A Response to Steven Kay and Joshua Kern
...each group acquired rights which it could not be forced to renounce.” (UN Doc. A/C.1/SR.127, 27 April 1948, p. 108). The Palestinian state established over the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza strip, is in exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination as recognized by the international community. The right of self-determination is widely acknowledged as a peremptory norm of international law. Only the Palestinian people and their political representatives have a legally valid claim to any part of these territories....06 Sep Towards Neutralizing the Jihadi Narrative: Settlement (No Pun Intended) of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
...as a shapeless abstraction which claimants of all kinds can shape Humpty-Dumpty-like to the needs of their particular causes). Palestine is the last of the Non-Self-Governing territories recognized as such at the inception of the UN. The others have experienced some process of self-determination, even if nothing more than “one person, one vote, once.” In the case of Palestine, the appropriate organ of the UN, the General Assembly, concluded (in 1947) that there were two People ( a politically sensible simplification, of course) in the territory and that in the...13 Mar O What a Rogue and Peasant State Am I!
...justified, but his actions do not help him achieve his desired end. He finds himself a miserable, melancholy knave. This scene from Hamlet came to mind yesterday when I attended a fascinating conference at UCLA on the topic of “rogue states.” After listening to the discussion, I could not help but pity (and fear) the poor rogue state. They are full to the brim with self-pity, and self-doubt, utterly consumed by their weakness. Exhibit One was North Korea. The former Thai Foreign Minister, Kantathi Suphamongkhon, presented a wonderful series of...
08 Jul The Sum of Four Fears: African States and the International Criminal Court in Retrospect–Part II
...strategy of soliciting self-referrals and ‘selective, self-serving readings of the Statute’s complementarity provisions’, the Court and its supporters have deliberately sought to abandon the ‘horizontal framework’ contained in the Rome Statute (‘rooted in State consent and deferential to the State’s primacy of action regarding criminal prosecutions’) in favour of a ‘vertical framework [where]… the Court enjoys priority over the national jurisdiction, incorporating notions of superior supra-nationality as an international body and implying a relationship of authority by intervening in the domain of domestic affairs’. Such a shift would be the...