The cold war ended fifteen years ago. However, in the case of international human rights law it looks like it never did. The International Bill of Human Rights still bears allover the marks of the struggle between liberalism and communism. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, in many regards, an extraordinary document. It was the first, and unfortunately the...
The D.C. Circuit this week rendered an interesting decision defining what constitutes a foreign terrorist organization. The case is Chai v. Department of State, and involved the State Department's designation of three Israeli right-wing extremist groups--Kahane Chai, Kach, and Kahane.org--as foreign terrorist organizations. If you want to get a sense of the organization, you can check out their...
Elaine Cassel has an excellent editorial in FindLaw today about the Bush administration's war on attorneys who have the temerity to defend alleged terrorists. In addition to Lynne Stewart and Lt. Commander Swift, she also discusses the government's investigation of Clive Stafford Smith, who defended the three GITMO prisoners who committed suicide last June -- an act described by...
Back in July, I wrote about U.S. treaty-making trends, noting that the Bush Administration was lagging when compared to previous administrations in terms of concluding treaties. Well, they’ve obviously been reading Opinio Juris, and now appear to be making up for lost time. In September 2006 alone, the President submitted 8 treaty packages to the Senate for advice...
With the MCA’s enactment, there seems to be a general sense of despair (or elation, depending on where you sit) that we are now in a world in which anything goes. As Jack Balkin writes, whether or not the MCA actually continues to constrain the President from engaging in certain conduct he characterizes as “torture lite” is an academic...
The U.N. General Assembly next week will likely vote to approve a resolution proposing an Arms Trade Treaty designed to regulate and limit the international trade in small arms. David Kopel of the Volokh Conspiracy has some very tough words for Control Arms, the leading NGO lobbying for the Arms Trade Treaty. But whether or not Control Arms is a...
There is a fascinating article in the Guardian (UK) today discussing a number of UK criminal cases in which defendants charged with destroying or vandalizing military property were able to use the illegality of the Iraq war to argue the defense of necessity. An Irish case is particularly striking: Last year, five peace campaigners were acquitted after using an...
There is always a topic du jour in international law, a subject that defines a season of international law. Between the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, it was the law of the sea. Between the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, it was international environmental law. Between the mid-1990s to present, it has been international criminal law. Every season is brought about by a major international...
My colleague Brian Tamanaha has the story over at Balkinization. Check it out… ...
The Office of Science and Technology Policy released last week the new "National Space Policy of the United States." According to the Washington Post, the new space policy, which supersedes a 1996 Clinton-era space policy, envisions a greater role for the military in outer space. Here are some of the new policy's fundamental principles, a number of which...
See this report here; pretty sketchy, without any elaboration from the Mexican government. It’s not easy to come up with an international law argument against a border fence, although one would assume a human rights basis (especially as combined with empirical evidence of resulting deaths from border smuggling moved into more inhospitable terrain). It wouldn’t seem that there’s...
I was at a recent event that involved a discussion with a federal appeals court judge regarding the interpretation of treaties in federal courts. One of the cases under discussion involved interpretation of a particular phrase in a well-known treaty. This particular judge is an extremely thoughtful, erudite, and scholarly judge. When someone in the room raised...
