In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

10 Dec

The text of Mohamed El-Baradei's Nobel Peace Prize Lecture is here. It is quite good. It is perhaps too utopian for my taste, but if any group deserves utopian license it is that category of individuals known as Nobel Peace laureates. We may have in El-Baradei a prophet of peace from (and for) the Arab world.The speech is hopeful, cosmopolitan,...

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09 Dec

In 1933, his first year as chancellor, Adolph Hitler began boycotting Jewish shops. By 1935 he deprived Jews of German citizenship. In early 1938, laws were passed restricting Jewish economic activity. In October 1938, thousands of Polish Jews were deported. Then, on the nights of November 9-10, 1938, a pogrom was unleashed on Jewish businesses as gangs of Nazi youth...

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08 Dec

What if contract law scholars never studied the end game? What if they offered little to no analysis of early contract termination, rescission, or frustration of purpose? What if the entire focus of contract law was on contract formation, performance and breach, and that any unilateral lawful attempts to avoid contractual obligations were looked at with a jaundiced...

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07 Dec

Secretary of State Condi Rice appears to have shifted or at least clarified U.S. administration policy over whether the Convention Against Torture's prohibition of "cruel, inhuman, and degrading" treatment extends to U.S. government personnel operating overseas. In a news conference with the Ukraine Premier, she stated (emphasis added):As a matter of U.S. policy, the United States’ obligations under the CAT...

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07 Dec

The United States is currently bound by over 10,000 treaties and other international agreements. That’s a big number. But as Detlev Vagts noted seven years ago (subscription required), the United States has done a poor job of making these treaties publicly available. In terms of publications, the situation has only deteriorated in the interim. If you are hoping to find...

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07 Dec

A Chilean court has just stripped former dictator Augusto Pinochet of his immunity so that he may face human rights charges in the disappearances of 29 people. While this may be a good decision from the perspective of retributive justice (see my earlier post on this), it has some troubling implications for international politics. Not the least of...

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07 Dec

Last week, US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton claimed that the UN was demonstrating its irrelevance by adopting several resolutions calling on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Bolton argued that the resolutions were undermining the real progress being made in the peace process, and only served to advance one narrow position and...

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07 Dec

An international survey of nine countries reveals that in no surveyed country except two do a majority of respondents maintain that torture is never justified. A majority in four countries maintain that it rarely, sometimes, or often is justified. In response to the question, “How do you feel about the use of torture against suspected terrorists to obtain...

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07 Dec

There are weeks when the irony level in the news is almost too much to bear. This is one of those weeks. In the city where the U.S. led and won the long battles against fascism and communist totalitarianism, a city that is now a vibrant center of democracy, the capital of one of the world’s largest economies...

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