Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is Vladimir Putin (runner up Al Gore; sorry Al). The article, the wittily titled "A Tsar is Born” is here. Here’s a brief excerpt (highlights added):He is clear about Russia's role in the world. He is passionate in his belief that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, particularly since...
I want to share a small vignette that I think symbolizes the stresses on countries that were once part of the Soviet Bloc but are now unsure if their future will be in seeking a closer alliance with Russia or with the West. In an article I published earlier this year I called such states systemic borderlands—states that are the...
With all this talk of Kosovo (and Transnistria), I would be remiss not to note the following. According to CNN:Tensions were rising in Bolivia on Saturday as members of the country's four highest natural gas-producing regions declared autonomy from the central government. Thousands waved the Santa Cruz region's green-and-white flags in the streets as council members of the Santa Cruz, Tarija,...
The past few days has seen an intense internal EU debate over the stance the EU should take concerning the status of Kosovo. It is interesting to see how talk about international law was deployed as a tool of statecraft. As discussed in my last post, Russia has had a turn toward “legalization” as it became clear that the...
Regarding Julian’s post on a possible Serbian suit in the ICJ over Kosovo, see also the following from AP and from AFP. According to these reports, the Serbs may seek a request by the Security Council of an advisory opinion from the ICJ concerning the status of Kosovo. They seem to want the Council to take up the...
I’ve just returned from a week in Brussels where I gave a public presentation concerning the Transnistrian conflict in Moldova, with reference to the various other so-called “frozen” conflicts such as Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. But the word I heard time and again was: “Kosovo.” Monday, December 10th, is the deadline for the negotiations on Kosovo’s final...
Matt Armstrong, who blogs at MountainRunner, has a thought-provoking guest-post over at Small Wars Journal on the Smith-Mundt Act, which is commonly understood as having intended to prevent blowback of propaganda intended for foreign audiences back into the U.S. Here’s an example from the act concerning the Voice of America (VOA). Section 501(a) of the Act provides thatinformation produced...
Ofer Eldar of Weil, Gotshal has posted a new essay to SSRN, entitled Vote Trading in International Institutions, forthcoming the the European Journal of Interntional Law. It sounds interesting; here is the abstract:There is evidence that countries trade votes among each other in international institutions on a wide range of issues,including the use of force, trade issues and elections of...
Last week, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote an op-ed in the NY Times that argued for re-orienting the State Department. Starting with a discussion of the fifty foreign service officers who received orders to go to Iraq, he wrote:However welcome, this is only a baby step toward a larger objective: to reorient the department and the...
Dr. Danilo Türk, international law professor, former diplomat, and former Assistant UN Secretary General, has “decisively won Slovenia's presidential election Sunday, the electoral commission announced.” (See the AFP and the VOA reports.) Dr. Türk, an international lawyer by training, was ambassador to the UN from 1992 to 2000, making him the longest serving Slovenian ambassador abroad. According to his bio on...
I have posted to SSRN a substantially revised version of my forthcoming article Transnational Tribunals and the Transmission of Norms: The Hegemony of Process. Transnational tribunals, which I define as dispute resolution mechanisms that allow nonstate actors such as individuals and companies to sue states for alleged infringements of their rights, include regimes as disparate as ICSID arbitrations and the...
We would like to invite our readers to join us for a drink this Friday evening at the Opinio Juris Reception at International Law Weekend. The reception, sponsored by Oxford University Press, will be from 5:30 pm to 6:30 pm in the Lobby Bar of the Algonquin Hotel, 59 West 44th Street (across the street from the New York...
