I will be in Moldova for the next week and a half, taking part in a project sponsored by the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. In all likelihood I will not post to Opinio Juris while I am away but I hope to share some impressions from Eastern Europe when I return...
Arab and South American states are finishing a summit meeting to discuss methods of cooperation on a broad range of issue areas. (Reports by the BBC and by Le Monde.) Co-Chaired by the Presidents of Brazil and Algeria, the summit hoped to find a “coalition on cultural, economic, and political” issues between two key blocs of the “South.” My snappish...
Scott Sullivan of Trans-Atlantic Assembly has a thoughtful post on the Bassiouni Affair, including a kicker on Taliban detainees in Guantanamo.See also this BBC report, forwarded by Greg Fox....
With all due respect to the hand-wringing over whether “The Interpreter” is too pro-UN (an impossibility in America’s current political climate, but I digress), you guys have missed the boat. Witness this: I’m watching Sesame Street with my daughter this morning and the muppets are in a furor. They can’t agree on who should start singing the Alphabet Song....
Jeff V., an incoming law student, posted a series of questions to a post of Julian’s which can be boiled down as follows (a) does the ICJ have U.S.-styled clerkships and (b) how can someone learn more about careers in international law? Here are some general responses.First, concerning clerkships at the ICJ: the ICJ has not traditionally had...
In a comment to Julian’s post on “The Interpreter,” Yuval Rubinstein provided a link to this article on Prof. Cherif Bassiouni of De Paul University Law School being pushed out of his job as the UN’s chief human rights investigator in Afghanistan by the U.S. government. (Thanks also to Greg Fox for separately e-mailing this article as well...
Adolfo Scilingo, a former Argentine Naval officer, was convicted by a Spanish court for crimes against humanity. This is the first such conviction under universal jurisdicition is Spain (that is, at issue here is not any croime against Spansih citizens or against the laws of Spain, per se, but rather acts that any country should be able to prosecute...
The stability of East Asia is a crucial problem for American (and the world’s) security. Julian’s post highlights what I find to be an ambivalence of many critics of international institutions: on the one hand they note that some country or region has “refused to jump on the internationalist bandwagon” but, on the other hand, they implicitly recognize that the...
Kenneth Anderson has some thought-provoking comments on the evolution of the customary norms of armed conflict here, as part of a longer post on an article by David Rivkin and Lee Casey on the ICRC's views. (I should state that, generally speaking, I find Rivkin and Casey's essays to be quite unpersuasive and a little paranoid. This David Rivkin,...
Julian’s point is well taken; what we may be seeing in the Bush administration is a shift to a more realistic foreign policy and less a continuation of the schizophrenia of the first term. I hope that is correct. But by the Administration's attempts to appease the fringe elements in its party, I fear that it is not.I accept...
Peggy’s post and Julian’s comment to her post set out some good arguments as to why John Bolton is or is not the right person to send to the UN. (Democracy Arsenal, by the way, has the top ten reasons why John Bolton should not be confirmed. Also note this post.) Regardless, I think there is little doubt that...
Following up on my previous post on Justice Ginsburg's speech at the ASIL, I note that the transcript to Justice Ginsburg's address is now available, here, at the ASIL website....
