Some prominent coverage in the last couple of days of Nicaragua's recent enactment of a total prohibition on abortion - see front page stories here and here in the Boston Globe and Washington Post. The reports suggest plans to take the law to the Inter-American Commission and the UN Human Rights Council. The WaPo story also mentions protests...
Here’s one international law development that did not appear in the headlines (are you surprised?). On October 25, 2006, the International Chamber of Commerce’s (ICC) Commission on Banking Practice and Technique (Banking Commission) voted unanimously to approve the UCP (Uniform Customs and Practices) 600, punctuating a 3 ½ year effort to revise the universally followed “rules of the road”...
When I am reviewing developments regarding international law to report here on Opinio Juris, I regularly have to separate the wheat from the chaff. For every case I report about an interesting international law development there are a dozen others that I entertain. Those dog cases are surprisingly interesting and sometimes humorous. They provide a unique insight...
It's been a difficult week for the new Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which is supposed to begin work in early 2007. First, an important meeting of the ECCC's Cambodian and international judges failed to reach agreement on the Tribunal's rules, which govern every aspect of its administration, including investigation procedures, trial motions, and appeals. ...
A judge in France has issued a series of arrest warrants against current high-level Rwandan government officials alleging they were involved in the 1994 assassination of President Juvenal Habyarimana, the assassination that many believe sparked the eventual genocide by Hutus against the Rwandan Tutsi minority. This isn't a case involving international human rights law directly. Rather the French judge is...
We have certain images in our minds about that first Thanksgiving. It usually involves bountiful harvests, amicable relations with the Indians, and prayerful thanksgiving to Providence for his manifold blessings. Well, it wasn't quite that simple. Although there are various versions of the "first Thanksgiving," one event that has a strong claim to it occurred at Plymouth,...
If true, this is fantastic news:Strong hints have emerged that the Vatican is preparing to change its policy on the use of condoms in the fight against Aids, after a 200-page study on the question, commissioned by the Pope, was passed to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for consideration. "This is something that worries the Pope a lot,"...
There’s been lots of recent buzz suggesting that the U.S. might start “talking with the enemy” (a.k.a. Iran). I suspect folks favoring such talks will groan when they hear CNN’s story of how an Iranian court is prepared to hand over the U.S. embassy in Tehran to an Iranian man, Hossein Alikhani, who successfully sued the United States in...
[Opinio Juris has requested David Sloss' permission to post this email he published on a international law list serve and he has kindly obliged] I finally was able to read the Texas court’s decision in Medellin. It strikes me that the court almost completely ignored the strongest argument in favor of the petitioner. That argument can be summarized as...
An astute reader forwarded this article to me about the role that the Library of Congress plays in assisting the Supreme Court and federal appellate courts in researching foreign and international law materials: Despite harsh criticism of the citation of foreign law in American court decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts solicit and are supplied with numerous...
Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and a number of other former U.S. Department of Justice officials filed an amicus brief yesterday in Al-Marri v. Wright, a case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (see the WPost article here). As a legal argument, the amicus brief offers little that is new or surprising. It...
As a number of critics of the U.N. reform process argued last year, the much-ballyhooed new United Nations Human Rights Council was unlikely to improve upon its much-derided predecessor. Those critics have been largely proven right by the Human Rights Council's performance thus far. Steadfastly one-sided and relentlessly obsessed with Israel, the Council has failed to build any...
