Search: self-defense

...of Internal Affairs, it is hard to say if there is enough evidence to attribute the responsibility for the breaches to Russia under international law (Art. 4-8 ARSIWA), and consequently to determine that Russia committed internationally wrongful act (Art. 2 ARSIWA). That in turn means that, to avoid violating international law itself, the safest option for Romania would be to limit itself to retorsions (as States often do in similar cases). When it comes to the reaction of international organizations, the European Commission has already opened formal proceedings against TikTok...

...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...

...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...

[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...

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....

...President to the ICC. Instead, exercising its right under Art. 17 of the Rome Statute, it prosecutes him for genocide itself. I see nothing in the Jordan appeal decision that rules out S3. If the ICC arrest warrant entitled Beta to arrest and surrender the President of Alpha to the ICC despite his HoS immunity, surely it entitled Beta to arrest the President and prosecute him itself. The principle of complementarity is a foundational part of the ICC’s jurisdictional regime. Beta has thus managed to evade HoS immunity simply by...

[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...

...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...

...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....

...lack thereof—is what this is really about. In the days and months after 9/11, while OLC was generating the Geneva Convention memos and the torture memos, L was being run by an ex-General Counsel of the Department of Defense (who had also been an Acting Secretary of Defense) and included a staff of lawyers who had worked more at negotiating, interpreting, and applying the laws of armed conflict than anyone else in the U.S. except for some of the uniformed JAGs. This is not to say that OLC was “evil,”...

The WSJ has a nice discussion of the tricky legal arguments in the upcoming trial of alleged pirates in U.S. federal court. Apparently, the prosecutors and defense attorneys are battling over the fact that U.S. statutes criminalizing piracy leave the definition to “the law of nations”. Now the court in Norfolk must contend with the defense motion to dismiss the piracy charge, which would leaving only such lesser charges as attempted plunder. The prosecution argues that U.S. courts should defer to international law, especially an 1982 U.N. Law of the...

...evil in mercy. Hardship is the only language that is used here. Anybody who is able to die will be able to achieve happiness for himself, he has no other hope except that. The requirement is to announce the end, and challenge the self love for life and the soul that insists to end it all and leave this life which is no longer anymore called a life, instead it itself has become death and renewable torture. Ending it is a mercy and happiness for this soul. I will not...