On Monday, the UN Human Rights Council voted to discontinue examining the human rights situations in Iran and Uzbekistan, which it was considering under its confidential complaint procedure (known as the "1503 procedure"). See the Reuters story here. The recommendation to end consideration was made by a five-country committee (one from each UN regional group) called the...
SSRN-bashing — most of it justified — has become something of a cottage industry lately. (See here, here, and here, for example.) My own gripe is a bit different: what annoys me the most about SSRN is the interminable delay between uploading a new version of an essay and having it actually replace the old one. As...
Wow. Big news:Australian David Hicks pleaded guilty to a charge of supporting terrorism on Monday before a US military tribunal. Looking somber with his hands clasped in front of him, Hicks, 31, stood beside his military lawyer who told the judge his client would not contest the charge of providing "material support for terrorism. The plea came at a hastily arranged...
Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy credited with forcing the final peace settlement in the Bosnia wars, is being accused of making a secret 1995 deal with notorious already-indicted Serb war criminal Radovan Karadzic to get Karadzic to give up power. Supposedly, Holbrooke agreed to not hunt Karadzic and prosecute him for war crimes if Karadzic would give up power. Media in...
Just out from Oxford University Press: The Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law, edited by my former University of Georgia colleague Dan Bodansky along with Jutta Brunnee and Ellen Hey. It's an impressive collection of 47 entries, with contributions from the likes of Christopher Stone, Peter Sand, Richard Stewart, Scott Barrett, Benedict Kingsbury, and Steve Ratner. I have...
Iran's seizure last week of 15 UK sailors for allegedly crossing into Iranian territorial waters is part of a very complex diplomatic story intertwined with Iraq, Iran's nuclear program, and longstanding UK-Iranian tensions. But it also raises some international legal questions. For instance, were the UK sailors actually in Iranian waters? The UK sailors had authority from...
On March 25, 1807, two hundred years ago today, Parliament passed An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Here is the key language of the Act: Be it therefore enacted by the King's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the...
As we get closer to the ASIL Annual Meeting, I would like to provoke some discussion about the future of international law, which is the theme of the conference. As noted in my Tuesday post, significant resources have been devoted to thinking about the future. Some of these efforts include the use of trends analysis and scenario building. Scenarios...
This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Economic Community (EEC), now the European Union. The Treaty of Rome was signed on March 25, 1957, expanding the European Coal and Steel Community into the new EEC of six states (France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). The EU has set up a portal site...
At its ongoing fourth session, the UN Human Rights Council's European Union and African Group members have now tabled competing draft resolutions on the human rights situation in Darfur, Sudan. Both drafts purport to be "follow-up" to the report presented to the Council last Friday by an assessment team led by Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams—but regrettably, neither actually...
Is there a war that harmed his party that Tony Blair doesn't support?British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday that going to war over the Falklands Islands against Argentina 25 years ago was the "right thing to do." Blair praised the "political courage" shown by former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in assembling a task force to fight a war with...
The European Court of Human Rights rendered an important decision this week on the European Convention's guarantees regarding "therapeutic abortions", i.e., abortions necessary for the life or health of the mother. The case summary of Tysiąc v. Poland is here and the full text of the judgment is here. Polish law (the "1993 Act") authorizes the termination of pregnancies if...
