Search: self-defense
17 Jan Symposium: Should a State’s Own Citizens Become Protected Persons During an Internationalized Conflict? Criticism Couched in Shameless Self-Promotion
...grant protected person status even to its own nationals if they have differing allegiance. Kubo claims that this interpretation is both in line with the spirit of humanization and also practical (or at least not completely unpractical), while attempting to refute a number of disagreeing authors, including myself (which probably explains why I chose this somewhat arcane topic). In the post I will first summarize the Tribunal’s position, then the arguments defending the ICTY jurisprudence, and I will try to demonstrate why I don’t find them particularly convincing. Needless to...01 Feb A Few Comments on “Revisiting the Doctrine of Intertemporal Law”
...perhaps arrive at a similar, yet broader, conclusion, through different means. When discussing the British position in the Chagos Islands case, Prof. Wheatley points out that the UK’s B-Series position rests in the conviction that the International Court of Justice “should decide the case in the same way it would have done in the late 1960s, a time when the legal status of the self-determination norm divided states”. For him, this is incorrect due to the inherent limitations with B-Series thinking. International law is not a “brute fact” static in...
10 May Rerouting Parts of Ukrainian Internet Traffic – A Violation of the Principle of Non-Intervention?
...on its own is already difficult to determine in practice, even before adding self-determination – another difficult to grasp principle of international law with its own contradictions, particularly in a context involving Russia and Ukraine – into the mix. However, the argument in favour of reconceptualising non-intervention in line with self-determination points to the core of why it seems dissatisfactory that non-intervention does not apply to many forms of foreign election interference: even where activities in question do not digitally alter the result, the ability of voters to independently and...13 Apr VJIL Symposium: Bâli Answers to Shambayati and Ginsburg
...self-governance from partisan politics. Rather, I argue, self-governance mechanisms that are representative of the judiciary as a whole – not exclusively judges from the highest courts – are an understudied but important feature of institutional design in post-authoritarian transitions. More specifically, I argue that the concept of judicial “independence” should include independence from elite capture when transitioning from the rule of the few to the rule of the many. When mechanisms of judicial self-governance – such as judicial councils that govern appointments, promotions and discipline of judges – are dominated...
13 Aug Why the Executive Order on the ICC is Unconstitutional and Self-Defeating
...Foreign States Second, the Rome Statute is an international treaty that supplements, but does not supplant each State Party’s right to exercise jurisdiction over criminal suspects who are either their nationals or who commit crimes in their territory. As such, every State Party can choose to exercise that jurisdiction itself or to delegate that jurisdiction to the International Criminal Court. This EO, if implemented, would directly interfere in all 123 State Parties’ own sovereignty by penalizing their right to make that choice. Hypocritically, the US itself is not a State...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...
03 Aug Options for a Peace Settlement for Ukraine: Option Paper XIII – Inclusion and Transparency in the Ukrainian Peace Process
...self-determination, the right to vote and take part in public affairs, and the prohibition of discrimination. As a fundamental rule of international law proclaimed in the UN Charter, human rights agreements and international customary law, self-determination gives peoples the right to ‘freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’ (Art. 1). The internal aspect of self-determination ‘implies meaningful participation in the process of government’ (p 30). Some scholars have relied on self-determination to argue that in the post-conflict situation there is a need to...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...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...
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...