Search: self-defense
08 Aug A Partial Defense of Hamdan and Judge Roberts
I also want to welcome Professor D’Amato to Opinio Juris. And, in the typical Opinio Juris fashion, I want to welcome him by immediately taking exception to some of the arguments he put forward in his inaugural post. I agree that Judge Roberts should be held responsible for the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Hamdan as much as if he had written the opinion for the Court. I simply don’t find that decision as troubling as Professor D’Amato seems to. First, I guess I don’t find the D.C. Circuit’s...03 Sep Professor Heller’s defense of Kenneth Roth
...that Israel believed necessary to neutralize the Hezbollah threat. Eye-for-an-eye is an accurate description of the French/Kofi Annan interpretation of the proportionality doctrine, and of the Heller-HRW caricature of Israeli strategy, not of Israeli strategy itself. Is it proper for Israel to use that force necessary to neutralize the threat? I believe it is and that is the way all states engage in warfare and that France, Russia etc. misinterpret the doctrine of proportionality. Perhaps Heller-HRW believe otherwise; if they do, I would much prefer that they have the intellectual...19 Apr In Defense of Humanitarian Intervention
[Jennifer Trahan is Associate Clinical Professor, at The Center for Global Affairs, NYU-SPS, and Chair of the American Branch of the International Law Association’s International Criminal Court Committee. The views expressed are those of the author.] Postings on Opinio Juris seem fairly squarely against the legality of the U.S. missile strike last week into Syria. Let me join Jens David Ohlin (blogging on Opinio Juris) and Harold Koh (blogging on Just Security) in making the contrary case. When NATO intervened in Kosovo in 1999, member states did not...04 Sep ICTR Defense Attorney Arrested for Genocide
The Australian is reporting that Tanzanian police have arrested Callixte Gakwaya, a defence attorney at the ICTR, on suspicion of involvement in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. “He was arrested yesterday. He is now in custody,” regional police commander Basilio Matei said. According to the arrest warrant, Gakwaya – who leads the defence team of a genocide suspect whose case comes up before the ICTR in January – supervised road blocks and massacred Tutsis as they tried to flee the Rwandan capital. “Several Tutsis were killed,” according to the warrant....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 Jun Non-innocence Under Article 19(2)(a) UNCLOS: A Response to Cavalcanti de Mello Filho
...ICJ did in relation to Israel’s violation of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination), when would a vessel transporting military equipment to that State be regarded as complicit or also engaged in the threat or use of force in violation of self-determination? This question, which is not the focus of this piece, is discussed in the legal opinion of ASCOMARE and is independent of the arguments made above. Regardless of what the threshold is or should be for a vessel to be regarded as violating principles of international...
02 Dec An International Law Analysis of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
...recognizes and seeks to undo differential colonial policies that privileged White economies over those of colonies; equally, PSNR concerns natural resources as a “means of subsistence” for a State and as a potential pathway toward economic freedom and self-sufficiency. Domestic economic growth is a sine qua non for the accrual of power and self-sufficiency in the modern international context, and as such, PSNR shares DNA with principles of self-determination and the right to development. In Resolution 1803 (1962), the General Assembly characterizes PSNR as a “basic constituent of the right...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’...
05 May Symposium on the UNWCC: Defences and the UNWCC
...finding was exceptional; the only reported example of a successful defence argument in the 15 volumes. In another similar example where self-defence was attempted [Hangobl, vol. 14], involving an airman who had bailed from a faltering plane and found himself in Austrian territory in 1944, and a civilian who was part of the local defence force found him, the defendant reported that on seeing the airman reach towards his jacket, him shot him once as he faced him and once in the back as the airman turned to run away....
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...