Thank you Julian, Chris, and Peggy for the opportunity to guest blog this week with Opinio Juris. I am writing from Chennai (Madras) India, a south Indian city teeming with 4.2 million residents, a quarter of whom are slum dwellers. I spent most of my first day here touring the city by car, overwhelmed by the masses of...
OK, I'm not quite signing off yet. I just wanted to point readers to two more sharp (and in my mind, devastating) attacks on Amnesty International's attempt to equate Guantanamo with "gulags". (A comparison that they have not backed away from, as Jon Adler notes here). One is by Kenneth Anderson in the Weekly Standard, and the other...
Opinio Juris is thrilled to welcome Professor Roger Alford, of Pepperdine University School of Law, as a guest-blogger, filling in (mostly) for me while I travel and catch up on a few other projects. Roger will be posting from India, where he is currently travelling for the next two weeks. Roger is a well-known scholar of foreign relations and private...
The WSJ($) reports today on a draft Pentagon report on China's military power that suggests the Pentagon is re-focusing its energy on China as a possible military rival to the U.S. The report supposedly has been the subject of inter-agency struggles between the Pentagon, which wants to discuss possible global conflict scenarios, and the State Department, which doesn't want to...
I noted a while back that the Bush Administration is treating the Law of the Sea as essentially ratified, even asking for money to fund the Law of the Sea Tribunal. Yesterday, more evidence of the Bushies' love of the Law of the Sea Treaty has emerged, strangely enough, in the context of the ongoing Louisiana-Florida battle of underseas oil...
Legendary British military historian John Keegan weighs in with an insightful criticism of the effect of modern international law (and especially institutions like the International Criminal Court) on the ability of a military to operate effectively. Reviewing the upcoming prosecutions of UK soldiers in UK courts, and perhaps in the ICC, he writes:The United States has been much denounced...
This piece does an decent job of trying to unpack the WTO's somewhat obscure dispute resolution system, which is now about to tackle the epic multibillion-dollar struggle between the U.S./Boeing and the EU/Airbus over aircraft subsidies. The WTO dispute resolution system is a hybrid between binding arbitration and a permanent stand alone court like the ICJ. The panelists are, as...
... on the EU Constitution, check out the discussion over at Transatlantic Assembly on the French vote and the state of the EU.UPDATELe Monde reports a 63% "No" vote by the Dutch. The number will likely be adjusted slightly in the next hour or two as all the results are counted....
For those not already sick of the topic, I, along with Greg Fox of Wayne State, Andreas Paulus of the Institute for Public International Law in Munich, and others, have been continuing to discuss the AI report in the comments section here....
All right, it's not the Today Show, but for anyone in the New England area who might be interested (or curious what I sound like), I will be discussing Amnesty International's recent human rights report on "Nite Beat with Barry Nolan" around 7:30 p.m. tonight on CN8, which is part of The Comcast Network. Also featured will be the...
This report details a curious effort by a South African businessman to attach an expected forthcoming money judgment from the International Court of Justice in favor of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. DR Congo has filed a claim against Uganda in the International Court of Justice seeking reparations for Ugandan violations of Congo sovereignty. In theory, DR Congo might...
What will the French “Non” to the EU Constitution mean for EU-hopefuls?I have just returned from a week and a half in Moldova and Romania. Romania is supposed to accede to the EU in 2007 or soon thereafter. What strikes me, though, is how many Romanians seems skeptical of European integration. There was, of course, the famous quip by Chirac...
