The UN Committee Against Torture has released their report and recommendation for the United States. It includes a statement that "The State party should cease to detain any person at Guantanamo Bay and close this detention facility." The report is available here. I franky am somewhat surprised that the U.N. Committee flatly called for the closure of...
Sounds like a personal ad on Craigslist. But it’s actually the demographic of the readership of Opinio Juris. Or at least it is based on the recent informal survey I conducted last week. According to the results of the survey as of yesterday, 83% of our readers are men, 92% are highly-educated (and therefore intelligent, no?), and...
Jack Goldsmith and Eric Posner have posted an article responding to the recent criticism regarding their book The Limits of International Law. It is available for download here. Here is the abstract: This essay replies to criticisms advanced at a conference on our book, The Limits of International Law. We criticize the critics for mostly complaining about our methodology,...
Attorney General Lord Goldsmith's speech last week made international news for his two paragraph discussion calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay. In that portion of the speech he argued that closing Guantanamo would be right as a matter of principle and also would "remove what has become a symbol to many - right or wrong- of injustice. The...
Ok, this is a really bizarre story. As reported here, "Nine Afghan asylum seekers who hijacked a plane at gunpoint to get to Britain should have been admitted to the country as genuine refugees and allowed to live and work here freely, the High Court ruled yesterday. In a decision that astonished and dismayed MPs, the Home Office was...
The Second Circuit recently rendered an important decision on the meaning of the "immovable property" exception to the FSIA. The case of City of New York v. Permanent Mission of India involved the propriety of imposing real property taxes on the permanent mission of India. New York law exempts real property owned by a foreign government if it is used...
Twenty-five years ago today, on May 13, 1981, an assassination attempt was made on the life of John Paul II. Days like today make me think of the counterfactual. Can you possibly imagine what the world would be like today without John Paul II? Peggy Noonan in her recent book, John Paul The Great, eloquently summarizes the...
The High Court in London ruled yesterday that the resettlement of native islanders from their homeland in the Indian Ocean was unlawful. The case of Bancoult v. Secretary of State is available here. The islands of the Chagos Archipelago are of no small significance to the United States and the United Kingdom. The United States leases the only inhabitable...
There is an interesting global poll released by GlobeScan Incorporated that is quite revealing about the future of blogs. Here's the bad news: the public generally does not trust blogs. The poll showed that blogs are the least trusted news source compared to all other news media. The public trusts blogs less than radio, newspapers, television, and family and friends....
A federal court in Washington D.C. ruled this week that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) applies to government conduct at Guantanomo Bay. The decision in Rasul v. Rumsfeld, (2006 WL 1216668) is not yet available online. The plaintiffs are detainees who allege various violations of RFRA, including harassment while worshipping, the shaving of their religious beards,...
By any measure the letter from President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is significant. It is the first direct contact between the leaders of Iran and the United States since the Iranian Revolution. Over twenty-fives years of silence. And then comes this most unusual letter. There are several things that struck me as remarkable about the letter. First, Ahmadinejad's...
