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...
British authorities used anti-terrorism powers yesterday to detain Glenn Grenwald's partner (Greenwald is the journalist with close links to Edward Snowden, the former U.S. spy agency contractor who has been granted asylum by Russia), as he passed through London's Heathrow airport. Greenwald's reaction is here, calling the incident "a failed attempt at intimidation.' A defense lawyer who gained rare access to...
Announcements A prize has been established by the Society of International Economic Law and Cambridge University Press for the best essay submitted on any topic in any field of international economic law. The competition is open to all current undergraduate and graduate students of any university or other tertiary education institution, and those who have graduated from a university or other tertiary education institution no earlier than...
This week on Opinio Juris, Kevin welcomed the new international criminal law blog Beyond The Hague to the blogosphere and sparked much debate with his post based on Judge Harhoff's recent comments about the ICTY Appeals Chamber's Perisic adoption of the specific-direction requirement and followed-up with a second post on the topic clarifying what the specific-direction requirement entails. Kevin also questioned the latest in...
Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called for the U.N. Security Council to convene quickly and act after what he described as a massacre in Egypt. The UN has said the departure of a team of chemical weapons inspectors to Syria was "imminent." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has insisted that US drone strikes must operate within international law. International medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres has announced...
North and South Korea are holding fresh talks on reopening the Kaesong joint industrial park, ahead of South Korea-US military exercises next week. United Nations inspectors are investigating a North Korean ship caught carrying arms from Cuba amid suspicion that the vessel is in breach of a wide-ranging arms embargo on North Korea. British energy giant BP is suing the US government...
UK authorities announced that they are considering legal action against Spain to force the country to loosen border controls in Gibraltar. In response, a Spanish foreign minister said that Spain will not back down on implementing tighter controls at its border with the disputed British territory of Gibraltar, escalating the row between the two countries. U.S. hopes of landing a coveted deal worth...
India and Pakistan have exchanged more gunfire across the disputed border in Kashmir, as a 10-year ceasefire frays over accusations of killings of soldiers deployed on the frontline. Israel published a list of 26 Palestinian prisoners set to go free within days, some after spending more than two decades behind bars, in the first stage of a deal that led to a...
