In addition to the vote on Schengen/Dublin discussed previously, the Swiss also voted on June 5 to allow registered partnerships, providing same-sex couples with some of the rights of marriage. Fifty-eight percent of voters and nineteen of twenty-six cantons voted yes. I admit I was somewhat surprised by the support for this measure, given Switzerland’s longstanding social conservatism....
Marty Lederman has this excellent analysis and the full text of the finally released JAG memos at Balkinization. What do the memos represent? The military lawyers on the United States vigourously objected to analysis by the Dept of Justice that the President is not bound by the Geneva Conventions -- or domestic criminal statutes -- when...
One of the items on the agenda for US Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's meetings today with the new Iraqi leadership was the future legal status of US forces, either under an extension of the current UN Security Council resolution authorizing the US presence or a new Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the US and Iraq. Both would create immunity...
Douglas Burgess has this take in Legal Affairs. He argues the Declaration of Paris offers a good model for a potential international treaty defining the crime of terrorism:TO UNDERSTAND THE POTENTIAL OF DEFINING TERRORISM as a species of piracy, consider the words of the 16th-century jurist Alberico Gentili's De jure belli: "Pirates are common enemies, and they are attacked...
To relatively little notice, the proposed European Constitution has garnered several more approvals this summer, following the well-publicized French and Dutch rejections in late May/early June. Latvia, Cyprus and Malta ratified it by parliamentary vote on June 2, June 30, and July 6, respectively. And, in the first popular referendum since the French and Dutch elections, on July 10 voters...
I want to welcome Elizabeth Kandravy Cassidy to Opinio Juris. Elizabeth is an American attorney currently living in Geneva who will offer a comparativist perspective to our musings. She has taught comparative and constitutional law overseas (Univ. of Namibia) and employment, gender and family law in the US (Princeton and Seton Hall). Over the next two weeks she will be...
For months, the Bush administration has relied on its own legal analysis (bolstered now by the DC Circuit's opinion in Hamdan) that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to detainees in Guantanamo. Nonetheless, President Bush claimed in 2002 that, despite this legal conclusion, all detainees in custody at Guantanamo and elsewhere would be treated "humanely" and consistent with the principles...
In the midst of the pre-confirmation feeding frenzy over Judge John Roberts, it is worth considering (okay, wildy speculating about) how he would approach the use of foreign judicial opinions, legal sources and the more complex questions about how international law is brought into effect through the federal courts. If, as the FT op-ed by David Garrow suggests, Roberts will...
The Iraqi Special Tribunal, constituted to try Saddam Hussein and members of his former government, announced Sunday that the first case against Saddam had been referred for trial. The referral is akin to indictment in the US criminal justice system, and will allow the trial to be scheduled. The first case involves Saddam's massacre of over 150 Shiites in Dujyal...
Marty Lederman has posted this excellent analysis of the Hamdan case over at Balkinzation.com. As Julian pointed out in his original post, the DC Circuit's conclusion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to the current conflict with al Qaeda is vulnerable on appeal to the Supreme Court. Lederman probes deeper into the question of whether Common Art. 3 of...
The papers this week have been filled with discussions of the ten-year anniversary of the Serb massacre at Srebrenica. Two articles well worth reading are Christopher Hitchen's post at Slate, and this one in the Economist (sub. req'd). I also read with great interest the comments to Julian's post on the broader question of deterrence and international criminal law. While...
The ASIL international organizations interest group has forwarded the following information about a conference call tomorrow, July 9, at 1:00 pm EDT, with Ed Mortimer of the UN and Don Kraus from Citizens for Global Solutions. For those of you interested in the reform agenda and the upcoming September summit, this sounds like a good opportunity to get up...
