Some versions of the proposed text for Iraq's Constitution have been posted here. Now Prof. D'Amato has already suggested there are possible conflicts between the proposed text's commitment to Islamic law and to international law. Which naturally leads to the legal question: in a conflict between domestic Iraqi law and international law, which law will prevail in the...
I suppose we can divide human rights into two types: those that people want, and those they don’t want. In the preceding parts of this thread, I’ve set out what I think is one of the hardest cases of the second type. I’ve pictured a Muslim woman (taking the term Muslim generically for present purposes—there are of course...
The UN has released more information on the eight candidates for the 5 opening slots on the ICJ here.Amor, Abdelfattah (Tunisia)Bennouna, Mohamed (Morocco)Buergenthal, Thomas (United States of America)González Campos, Julio D. (Spain)Keith, Kenneth (New Zealand)Mazou, Seidou Adamou (Niger)Sepúlveda Amor, Bernardo (Mexico)Skotnikov, Leonid (Russian Federation)Here is a useful horse-race analysis from a knowledgeable source who works for a government agency:There are...
In my attempt to understand the mind-set of a Muslim woman, I will put into one combination speech the words of many Muslim women who have talked to me over the years, plusa lot from the scholarly literature of Western observers—primarily women—who have studied the lives of Muslim women:We know more than you think about American women. We...
U.S.-Canada trade relations appear to have hit a new low as Canada has suspended further settlement talks over U.S. tariffs on Canadian softwood lumber. This may sound fairly trivial compared to some of the rather momentous topics that Prof. D'Amato has treated Opinio Juris readers to over the past week and a half, but I think the problems Canada is...
I'm also back after another short hiatus. I will post at greater length later this week, but for now I just wanted to note some recent pushback on those controversial Article 98 Agreements between the U.S. with a number of its allies preventing U.S. soldiers from being extradited to the International Criminal Court. Nigeria's Senate recently passed...
I just wanted to check in with everyone from the Opinio Juris Central Command Bunker hidden deep in the hills of… well, it doesn’t really matter where we are. Peggy, Julian and I will start showing up a bit more as we are in the process of finishing up articles and/or traveling.I wanted to post this general comment, though, on...
If we consider the quantity of people affected and the quality of the effect, there is no greater injustice in the world today than the denial of equal rights for women. I’m talking specifically about women in fundamentalist Muslim countries in the Middle East. I am also talking about women in fundamentalist Catholic countries in Latin America, although...
[Note: here is Tony D'Amato's latest post. I am posting it for him because we seem to be having a software glitch. I have isolated the problem to the hyperlinks so I have removed the links from this post so that the full text may appear. Once the problem is fixed, we will put the links back in. ~ Chris]The...
I continue to be amazed when educated people say that international law is not binding on the United States, or that international law cannot be enforced against a superpower, or that the United States can violate international law whenever it wants to, or that international law doesn’t exist.Let’s take the strongest of these claims: the enforcement claim. Let’s stipulate...
When I was a kid with my eyes glued to the silver screen, I wondered why Ingrid Bergmann and Humphrey Bogart were taking their sweet time in getting out of Paris. There they were with German tanks proceeding relentlessly toward them and the noise of artillery fire in the distance. But where was the Luftwaffe? Where were...
Should President Harry S Truman be regarded today as a war criminal for ordering the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sixty years ago? If history indicts him for the two events, I would argue that as to Count Two, the bombing of Nagasaki, he was clearly guilty and would have deserved the death sentence. The horror of...
