The Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the US has agreed upon a draft AUMF, authorizing President Obama to carry out strikes in Syria. Foreign Policy has a post warning that this 60-day authorization may be just a prelude to intervention in the Middle East as well as a piece entitled The Syrian Abyss. Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country may approve...
The UN chemical weapons inspection team in Syria is set to begin transferring samples that it has collected from the country to the laboratories for testing. More than 2 million refugees have now fled Syria's civil war, piling pressure on neighboring host countries according to the UN. Sweden is set to change its asylum law and grant permanent residency to those...
Just as Syria has been our main focus the last few days with our Insta-Symposium, there has been a lot written elsewhere on the developing situation. Just a sampling of a couple other articles of note: one from William Schabas on intervention as aggression and one from Charli Carpenter urging us not to use the term "humanitarian" for this intervention....
Calls for Papers The University of Liege Law School will host Nudging Europe: What Can EU Law Learn From Behavioural Sciences? December 12-13, 2013. They have put out a call for papers for this event. Papers addressing the implications of behavioral sciences for contract law, competition law and risk regulation will be particularly welcome, but all areas of EU law are of interest. Where relevant,...
We have invited several academic luminaries to post here at Opinio Juris over the next few days about the ongoing situation in Syria. We also are going to follow in our own footsteps from our Kiobel symposium, by inviting young academics and practitioners to submit guests posts for possible publication. We can’t guarantee we will publish every post submitted, but we...
The UK has put a proposed resolution before the Security Council on Syria calling for military action to protect civilians, perhaps delaying US action. China has also called for restraint and calm in the situation, saying any intervention in the region would only make the turmoil worse. Human Rights Watch has a statement on possible intervention in Syria calling on all...
On the day we mark 100 years of the Peace Palace in The Hague, the US and its allies are readying for a military intervention in Syria with Australia saying it would back military action, even without a Security Council resolution. Action may come within days. China's top paper accused the US of wanting regime change in Syria and likened any military...
Heading the news today is the escalating rhetoric about the planning of a military intervention in Syria, some reporting in the same vein as the 1999 NATO Kosovo bombing campaign, as the US points its finger at the Syrian government for the recent chemical weapons attack (official remarks here). Julian discussed legality of an intervention without Security Council approval. After UN...
UN inspectors will be allowed into the Damascus suburb to investigate an alleged chemical weapon attack that killed approximately 355 civilians last week. Julian mentioned that the US may be looking into military intervention into Syria, a move that Russia is concerned about, warning the US not to repeat past mistakes in the region. Despite Russia's pleas for restraint, in Jordan,...
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces bombarded rebel-held suburbs of Damascus today, keeping up pressure on the besieged region a day after the opposition accused the army of gassing hundreds in a chemical weapons attack. In response, the U.N. Security Council said it was necessary to clarify the alleged chemical weapons attack in the suburbs of Damascus, but stopped short of explicitly...
Japan will dramatically raise its warning about the severity of a toxic water leak at the Fukushima nuclear plant today, upgrading the threat from a level 1 "anomaly" to a level three "serious incident" on an international scale for radiological releases. The British government, accused of abusing media freedom, has said police were right to detain a journalist's partner if they thought...
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Monday he was "deeply disturbed" by the deaths in custody of 37 supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and condemned an ambush by Islamist militants that killed 25 Egyptian policemen. A leading diplomat from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. ambassador to Syria will meet with a Russian delegation in The Hague next week to...
