Search: self-defense
20 Jan The United Nations General Assembly Request to the International Court of Justice for an Advisory Opinion: (Some) Reflections
...life; trust/self-determination; and temporariness. The tests are international humanitarian law (IHL)-based, but they also include non-IHL rules, such as those pertaining to annexation, self-determination, and others. I note that the commission only summarizes its understanding of the test drawn up by Lynk and others, but shifts its focus to two indicators: permanence and annexation. When treated separately, acting contrary to these fundamental tenets would amount to (mostly) singular violations. When grouped together, they are seen as creating an unlawful situation (although for Lynk, the violation of one would seem to...
16 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: Mnemohistory and the Affective Life of International Law – A Method for the Madness
[Miriam Bak McKenna is Associate Professor of Law and Global Governance at Roskilde University, School of Social Science and Business. Her book Reckoning with Empire: Self-Determination in International Law (Brill) was released in December 2022.] By now it is perhaps axiomatic to assert that the historical narratives surrounding international law are rather murky at best. As the canon of texts revisiting and critiquing these accounts expands, the creeping sense that international law finds itself in the midst of a George Santos style identity crisis continues to grow. History may be...31 May More Relentless Self-Promotion: Ku on TV
All right, it’s not the Today Show, but for anyone in the New England area who might be interested (or curious what I sound like), I will be discussing Amnesty International’s recent human rights report on “Nite Beat with Barry Nolan” around 7:30 p.m. tonight on CN8, which is part of The Comcast Network. Also featured will be the head of Amnesty’s New England chapter....
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....
15 Feb Symposium on Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force: Conflicts of Interest in International Law Scholarship – Addressing An Indifference to Capitalist Imperialism
[Isa Blumi is Associate Professor at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Stockholm University.] Dr. Agatha Verdebout’s Rewriting Histories of the Use of Force (2021) charts how International Law’s founding generations of scholars sought relevance during times when the powerful adopted “the law” only when it suited their interests. By reading beyond the ‘emotional’, ‘cynical’, or ‘idealistic’ discourse that accompanied assertive claims about the distinctive eras of this Euro-American global order, Verdebout (pp. 213-319) methodically ‘deconstructs’ the self-serving discourse of 20th century scholars’ assumptions that they have improved...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...
31 Jul When Neurotechnology Erodes Freedom of Thought: The Habeas Cogitationem Writ
...Habeas Writ Habeas corpus (‘you shall have the body’) is a well-known urgent procedural mechanism for protecting the physical/bodily self-determination of citizens in situations such as illegal detention or torture, among others. The Oxford Dictionary of Law defines this mechanism as [a] prerogative writ used to challenge the validity of a person’s detention, either in official custody (e.g. when held pending deportation or extradition) or in private hands. This writ, widely used throughout the world, is complemented in various countries by a similar mechanism intended to protect the informational self-determination...
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...
26 Mar Symposium on Prosecuting Heads of State for International Crimes: The Tangled Legal Terrain of the Maduro Cases – Crimes Against Humanity, Drug Trafficking and the Immunity of an Alleged President
...government to perpetuate the oppression of the population, reactivating rapidly and intensively the system of harassment and violent repression against real or perceived opponents (para. 34). Maduro self-proclaimed himself as the President claiming to enjoy all the sovereign prerogatives attached to the office even if he didn’t show any official data and proofs of his victory, violating the Venezuelan Constitution (Article 120). But international law confers immunity by virtue of office, not by self-proclamation, and under Venezuelan domestic law, virtue of office has to be recognized to the elected President...