Recent meetings in Germany of the G4 (the EU, the United States, India and Brazil) failed to bridge the necessary gaps in the positions of the key representatives for the developed and developing countries. If there was any doubt before, it definitely appears that Doha is dead. You can read the press statements from the US here and...
The Special Court for Sierra Leone has convicted three men of war crimes and crimes against humanity during Sierra Leone's decade-long civil war. The convictions include, apparently for the first time, a conviction for child recruitment. Here is the Court's press release. These are the Court's first judgments since it was jointly established by the United Nations...
In one of the more remarkable posts I have read, Brian Tamanaha over at Balkinization loudly protests against the virtues of patriotism: For many reasons, I feel fortunate to have been born in the United States, but I don’t love my country. It has no love for any of us. A cold, manipulative, object of affection, the state fans patriotism, then...
Okay, no sucha thing, as my five-year-old boy would say. It's part of the marvelous counter-historical backdrop to Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union. The premise is that several million Jews were extended "Ickes passports" early in the war (thus reducing the toll of the Holocaust by two-thirds), a population thereafter swollen by the defeat of...
If you want entry-level work in England, you best polish your Polish. According to this news report, some British citizens allegedly are being turned away from agricultural and factory work in England because they don't speak Polish. "The influx of Eastern European workers means the language is now vital for jobs in agriculture, says MP Malcolm Moss. His...
Vanity Fair has a special issue devoted to the subject. The issue is guest-edited by Bono, with 20 different covers at the newstand featuring evryone from Brad Pitt to Condi Rice to Madonna. I took the $4.50 hit for Opinio Juris readers (our crossover audience is probably in the single digits). What can you say, it's an...
As regular readers know, Julian and I disagree about whether international law promotes or impedes the peacemaking process in war-torn countries. I do not believe that international law is an end in itself, and I acknowledge that in some situations the involvement of international organizations like the ICC can have negative consequences. But I question Julian's assumption that...
The case of Powerex v. Reliant Energy Services presents a delicate procedural question regarding appellate jurisdiction and the FSIA immunity protections. Bottom line: Do federal appellate courts have jurisdiction over FSIA questions (i.e., whether a corporation is a foreign state entity) when an appeal is jurisdictionally barred? The answer from the Supreme Court today is no. The case...
On October 16, 1975, the first full day of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, five journalists — two British, two Australian, and one New Zealander — were killed in the border town of Balibo. The official Indonesian position has always been that the journalists were accidentally killed in a crossfire as they attempted to film Indonesia's invasion of the...
In addition to Julian's comments from last week about the Supreme Court's opinion in India v. New York, I just had one other quick thought about Justice Thomas' majority opinion. It should be underscored that the majority's approach to statutory interpretation appeared quite comfortable in relying on international law. It is not exactly a Charming Betsy case, because...
Sudan announced yesterday that it would agree to a U.N.-led peacekeeping force operated in cooperation with the African Union. The U.N.-led force of 19,000 will eventually be deployed in 2008. No one is getting overly excited about the prospects of this U.N.-led force, and I don't think it is quite yet the solution to the Darfur crisis. Still, it is...
I doubt it, but this report from AP suggests otherwise. If it really turns out to be a problem, it seems like the only fix at this point is an amendment to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. That's going to take a while, though. ...
