In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Kenneth Anderson

22 Feb

Kristen asks in her post below whether anyone has a view on whether the UN’s assertion that the cholera epidemic claims in Haiti constitute a public law claim, and hence not within the purview of Section 29 of the UN Convention on Privileges and Immunities is supported by  law or past practice?  I don't have a view, or any genuinely legal materials to raise, but curiously I encountered the issue in passing, in practice as general counsel for an NGO during the Bosnian war in the 1990s.  Circumstances were unique, and for various reasons my client organization decided not to pursue it as a matter of research or dispute, but Section 29 specifically came up as a comment from UN officials I was negotiating with at the time. At the time of the Dayton Accords, the agreement and all the parties - not just signers of the Accords but states, the UN, various other international bodies - agreed there needed to be a TV and radio network reestablished across Bosnia that would broadcast in all languages, provide neutral news reporting, etc., in the run-up to the elections.  But broadcast towers and all that had been destroyed, so the physical infrastructure needed to be put in place very quickly.  The states involved, and some organs of the UN - I'm sure I'm not remembering the details correctly - agreed in principle to fund this, but expressed concern that they could not get the funds flowing quickly enough to meet the deadlines.  So my organization was invited to consider whether it would front the funds, pay for the work, hire the consultants and contractors, and see that the work was completed in time.
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04 Feb

I posted a few weeks ago about the scandalous situation of adulterated Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO) exported from Italy, Greece, and Spain.  Here is an update on the international olive oil market from Ed Dolan of EconoMonitor.  He reports that cold weather in Spain, followed by drought, has shrunk the Spanish harvest: There is little doubt about what is happening...

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29 Jan

Perhaps some OJ readers caught this abstract from the SSRN public international law postings this week, but if you didn't, I want to commend it to you:  Eyal Benvenisti and Amichai Cohen, "War as Governance: Explaining the Logic of the Laws of War from a Principal-Agent Perspective." I have read it once, and plan to re-read it; I've long followed...

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16 Jan

Ordinarily I would leave events posting to our regular postings, but I fell behind and wanted to flag the upcoming Friday deadline for paper proposals for the "Law and Robotics Conference." It will take place on April 8-9, 2013, at Stanford Law School (the conference follows on the highly successful law and robotics conference that took place at University of Miami...

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12 Jan

Opinio Juris is pleased to note official White House reaction to the petition (via the We the People White House site, an Obama administration initiative promising an official response to citizen petitions garnering 25,000 signatures within 30 days of posting) calling upon the Obama administration to “secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.” As reported by Entertainment Weekly  (the only truly canonical outlets for this kind of news would have to be EW or Wired, Hollywood or Silicon Valley), here is the official administration response, from Paul Shawcross, Chief of the Science and Space Branch of OMB (we must assume this went through the authoritative interagency clearance process and perhaps one day might even contribute to the opinio juris of the United States for purposes of interstellar law of war on the destruction of planets):
“The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense,” begins Shawcross, “but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon.” He cites a Lehigh University study that calculated that a Death Star would cost a deficit-exploding $852,000,000,000,000,000 (that’s $852 quadrillion), notes that “the Administration does not support blowing up planets,” and rightly points out that it would be foolhardy to build a space station “with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship.” Shawcross then goes on to tout the many space endeavors, both public and private, that are currently underway. (“Even though the United States doesn’t have anything that can do the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, we’ve got two spacecraft leaving the Solar System and we’re building a probe that will fly to the exterior layers of the Sun.”) He concludes by encouraging the diligent soul(s) who created the petition to pursue a career in a science, technology, or math-related field, declaring that anyone who does so embraces the power of the Force: “Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.”
I've put the full text of the Obama administration response below the fold (and check out the many interesting links at the White House site, which I haven't included). It is more substantive than one might have anticipated - it discusses private space flight initiatives, the International Space Station and - naturally! - robots. Update:  Response from the Air Force General Counsel's Twitter feed (and I recommend both the Twitter feed (@AirForceGC) and blog:
Still smarting from Death Star decision, but must admit weapons review would have been a bear.
Referring to US legal requirements for a review of the legality of all weapons systems, meeting the terms of Article 36 of 1977 Additional Protocol I.
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03 Jan

(Plainly I'm not above a risqué title to shamelessly drive web traffic but I'm afraid this post is all about fraud in the international extra virgin olive oil trade.)  I'm an unsophisticated but enthusiastic aficionado of extra virgin olive oils, ever since a sabbatical in Spain years ago. I was aware of Tom Mueller's 2007 New Yorker article on international trade in adulterated extra virgin olive oils (EVOO), but somehow hadn't read it, as I figured I knew what it said.  Reading Mueller's subsequent 2011 book, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, which my daughter gave me for Christmas, well, I was horrified.  Well, seriously deflated at least; we're not talking about war crimes here.  But really irritated, speaking as a consumer who has willingly paid not-inconsiderable amounts for EVOO on the theory that college is overrated. It's not that my palate is so very refined, I hasten to add. I've yet to discover, for example, the "banana" notes in the latest olive oil sample delivered by Santa, let alone the "artichoke" and "berry," despite oxygenating it while noisily slurping it with the special technique I learned at one tasting (and which drives my wife from the kitchen).  I'm embarrassed to say that I'm not entirely sure I'd be able to identify a bad or even stale ("fusty") EVOO. I'm even less sure, now that I've understood from Mueller's book just how much of the normal stuff, and even premium priced stuff - and especially the stuff arriving to market shelves in the United States - is low grade ordinary olive oil ("lampante," meaning fuel or lamp oil), or other seed oils, deodorized and refined through heat and solvents to the point of being tasteless, with a variable amount of EVOO added for flavor. If I'm dismayed as a consumer, speaking as a professor of international economic law, I'm both shocked and astonished at the levels of fraud in the international EVOO trade.  I naively assumed that olive oil, given its importance in the EU, would be regulated with nearly as much care as wine.  It turns out that, quite apart from illegal adulteration, EU regulations permit olive oil to be brought to Italy from Spain, Greece, and in many cases both legally and illegally from Morocco or Tunisia, processed and packaged and sold as Italian olive oil.  Italian law on adulteration, far from being concerned about the protection of a national reputation for setting the world-standard, demonstrates all the characteristics of regulatory capture.  Mueller's outrage is not merely on behalf of defrauded consumers worldwide (including the EU and Italian publics, who are no more knowledgeable about olive oil adulteration than people anywhere else), however, but is particularly directed to the economic pressures that the adulteration puts on the mostly smaller producers who do maintain quality standards, in accordance with law.  They simply can't compete with products that appear indistinguishable from theirs, but whose costs are a mere fraction.
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27 Nov

At almost the same moment that Human Rights Watch/Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic released its report, "Losing Humanity: The Case Against Killer Robots," which called for states to establish a treaty that would prohibit the "development, production, and use" of "fully autonomous weapons," the Pentagon (under Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter's signature) issued a DOD Directive, "Autonomy in Weapons...

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