In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Recent Posts

13 May

The U.S. Trade Representative's Office has released some further details on its agreement with Congress to incorporate international labor standards into future U.S. free-trade agreements. Here are a couple important new institutional innovations. (1) Violations of international and local labor standards will apparently be subject to the same international dispute resolution mechanisms as the rest of the trade agreement. This...

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12 May

Thanks to a recent bilateral arrangement, you can now enjoy Indian mangos in the United States. To hear Indians talk about this, the issue is more important than nukes or Kashmir. The first shipments arrived this week in New York. Fruit flies had been the problem; irradiation the answer, a good enough one for USDA. (The US,...

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11 May

My time as guest blogger here at Opinio Juris is coming to an end. Many thanks to Chris and the other permanent contributors for inviting me, as well as to all of the readers and commenters of my posts. I've enjoyed it, and I certainly hope you did too. All the best, Marko ...

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11 May

Oxford University Press has just launched a new online database called International Law in Domestic Courts. It is edited by Professors André Nolkaemper and Erika de Wet of the University of Amsterdam. The Board of Editors includes Dinah Shelton and Ralph Steinhardt, among other luminaries. The goal of the database is to collect all the major domestic...

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11 May

President Bush and Democratic leaders in the U.S. Congress have reached an agreement on a bipartisan trade policy to be applied to all future U.S. free-trade agreements. According to one account, the new policy commits U.S. trade partners to adopting and enforcing laws that abide by basic international labor standards as outlined in a 1998 International Labor Organization declaration....

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10 May

I had lunch today in London with a very prominent British international law scholar and, of course, the main topic of conversation was Tony Blair. I will not reveal the name of the person to respect confidences, but will outline the gist of his impressions. He said that Tony Blair has done many good things in the domestic...

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10 May

AALS and ASIL are co-sponsoring a mid-year conference in Vancouver, BC June 17-20 on the theme "What's Wrong with the Way We Teach and Write International Law?" Full details, including on-line registration, can be found here. This should be a great opportunity to recharge the batteries, engage in some serious discussion — in both panel format and in...

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10 May

Many people today think of humanitarian law or the law of armed conflict as essentially part and parcel of human rights law. This is, of course, historically incorrect, as the law of war predates human rights law by centuries, the latter truly emerging only in the crucible of World War II. Philosophically, however, the idea that humanitarian law guarantees a...

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10 May

In a shameful day for British criminal justice, David Keogh and Leo O'Connor have been convicted of violating Britain's Official Secrets Act for leaking a confidential memorandum between Bush and Blair that quotes a threat by Bush to bomb Al Jazeera's headquarters in Qatar:The memo was a note of a meeting between US President George Bush and the British Prime...

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09 May

It began with a bang — the explosion of an airplane with 73 innocent lives aboard — and ends with a whimper: on Tuesday, citing the "universal sense of justice," U.S. district judge Kathleen Cardone threw out the false-statement charges against Luis Posada Carriles, ordered his electronic bracelet removed, and watched him walk out of the courtroom a free man....

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09 May

A federal court in California rendered a decision last week that included one of the most unusual references to international law I have ever seen. In the case of United States v. Slocum, 2007 WL 1290249, prison gang members Ronald Slocum (a.k.a. "McKool") and Henry Houston (a.k.a. "Tweek") received a message written in invisible ink from gang leaders outside...

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