Your weekly selection of international law and international relations headlines from around the world: Africa The IMF has extended its zero-interest loans to Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia to provide support in the fight against Ebola. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called upon the world to do more. The ICC has opened a formal examination into the situation in the Central African Republic. Middle...
Calls for Papers The British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL) is making a worldwide Call for Papers on British Influences on International Law 1915-2015. The Institute is publishing a series of books to commemorate the centenary of the establishment in London of the Grotius Society (a forerunner of BIICL) in 1915. One of these books is on British Influences...
This week on Opinio Juris, Jens, Jennifer Trahan and Julian discussed the international legal basis for the air strikes against ISIS. Jens also analysed why Khorasan is seen as a more immediate threat to the US than ISIS. For more on the US domestic legal basis, check out Deborah's post with a snippet from her Daily Beast article on the perennial US War Powers...
The Junior International Law Scholars Association (JILSA) is holding its annual meeting on Friday, January 23, 2015, at the University of Miami School of Law. JILSA is an informal network of junior scholars at mostly American law schools who get together annually for a self-funded workshop. Junior faculty and fellows interested in presenting at the meeting should email proposals to...
This week on Opinio Juris, we hosted an insta-symposium on the Scottish Independence Referendum. David Scheffer surveyed the legal terrain in case of a yes vote, Stephen Tierney discussed how Scotland's move to independence would be characterised under international law, Milena Sterio argued that international law could develop a norm containing a positive right to secession under certain circumstances, Jure Vidmar looked at...
This week on Opinio Juris, summer vacation is officially over. We hope that all of our readers in the Northern Hemisphere enjoyed a great break - hopefully not quite like the Russian soldiers in Ukraine that Jens commented on. For those of us in the Southern Hemisphere: it's almost summer! Kevin followed up on an earlier post arguing that despite the recent release of...
Call for papers The Faculty of Law of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Columbia Law School invite the submission of written proposals for an international conference on the international law legacies of the Palestine mandate, to be held in Jerusalem on June 21-22, 2015, and for a subsequent publication. The full call for papers can be found here. Researchers interested in addressing these and related...
This week on Opinio Juris, we welcomed Jens Ohlin to our masthead. Kevin asked whether it's time to reconsider the al-Senussi admissibility decision, linked to a Rolling Stone article about Chevron and the Lago Agrio case, and criticized attempts to assess the proportionality of an attack based on combatant:civilian kill ratios. There was more on the Gaza Conflict in a guest post by Liron Libman,...
This week on Opinio Juris, Julian asked whether the US President can enter into a legally binding climate change agreement without Congress, and educated news agencies about the difference between Taiwan's airspace and its Air Defense Identification Zone. The main focus this week was on the Middle East. Kevin commented on an Al Jazeera America piece on Israel's attack on Shujaiya, while Peter discussed the...
International Law in Practice is a four-day programme run by the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL), which provides a broad introduction to key issues in international and comparative law - from public to private and from commercial to human rights. The course is unique in that it introduces participants to international law, as broadly understood and as...
This week on Opinio Juris, we had the final instalments of our Emerging Voices symposium, with a post by Tamar Meshel on awakening the "Sleeping Beauty of the Peace Palace" and one by Mélanie Vianney-Liaud on the controversy surrounding the definition of the Cambodian genocide at the ECCC. More definitional issues arose in Kevin's post discussing Britain's expanded definition on terrorism, which now includes watching the video...
This week on Opinio Juris, we started with follow-up on last week, with Julian raising more issues with the emerging Article II humanitarian intervention power and Kevin sharing his final thoughts on the Bar Human Rights Committee's letter to the OTP in relation to the situation in Gaza. More on the Gaza situation in a post by Kristin Hausler and Robert McCorquodale, who asked whether attacks on schools,...
