Search: self-defense
23 Apr The Political Price of Apologies: Why States Balk at Historical Apologies Despite Limited Legal Risk
...described apologies as Apologies are speech acts that have the power to, in the words of Barkan, “amend the past so that it resonates differently in the present for those who feel aggrieved by it or responsible for it.” For the magic of these speech acts to be realized, however, it must be preceded by an internal process of critical self-examination and self-interrogation that makes the political event of an apology possible. For colonial states, this usually means reckoning with significant parts of their history, their self-image and their political...
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,...22 Jan Massachusetts High Court Finds Vienna Convention on Consular Relations Self-Executing?
Actually, I am not quite sure, since all I have is this report on the recent decision of the Supreme Judicial Circuit of Massachusetts holding that the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations gives foreign nationals legal rights to the notification of their consular officials if they are arrested by Massachusetts authorities: Massachusetts, Cordy wrote, will take steps now to bring the state into compliance: “In order to enable the full effect to be given to [the Vienna Convention], we conclude that the notifications it requires must be incorporated...
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...
06 Sep Once Again: Drone Killings and International Law
...because of effective control, or if the State of sojourn offers the terrorist actor protection and is unwilling or unable to take effective action against it (cf. once again BVerfG, 2 BvE 2/16, paras. 50–51). In this case, an international armed conflict may even arise between the attacking State and the State of sojourn (ICRC Commentary, para. 511). A prerequisite for invoking self-defence, however, is that the use of force against which the attacking State is defending itself exceeds the threshold of an “armed attack” within the meaning of Article...
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...
02 Sep Back to the Drawing Board of the Partition Plan: Vice-President Sebutinde’s Erroneous Account of Palestinian and Israeli Claims of Title to the Territory of Mandatory Palestine (Part One)
...The odd judge out is Vice-President Sebutinde, who in her dissenting opinion opines (para. 1; see also paras. 67, 69): the Court has not received arguments or evidence on the territorial scope (i.e. borders) of the State of Israel as on the eve of independence; nor of Israel’s competing territorial claims in relation to the disputed territory. These are issues that must first be addressed before the legal consequences of the alleged occupation of territory by Israel, or the territorial scope of Palestinian self-determination, can be determined. She then complains...
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...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...
24 Aug Reframing Transitional Justice: Introduction to the Symposium
...doing things and one entry point—transitional justice could be reconceived in a more diverse, crisscrossing, and crosscutting fashion. For us, the perched figure exudes anxiousness. It is just so insecure, tattered and fraying, self-sabotaging … and … self-centered but (as is often the case with such characters) just so un-self-aware. We hope instead to think about a calmer and more empathetic transitional justice that, while sensitive, also can guide pacifically rather than prattle nervously. And the beans on the ground—seeds, perhaps dropped by the anxious distracted figure, seeds that fell...