Last Thursday, ICJ President Roslyn Higgins Q.C. delivered a sort of "state of the ICJ" speech to the U.N. General Assembly along with the Annual Report of the ICJ. As longtime readers of this blog may recall, teasing the ICJ about its self-importance and inefficiency is a favorite hobby-horse of mine. Judge Higgins' speech and the 2005/2006 Annual Report...
Last month, as I reported here, Chile's Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision that stripped Pinochet of his immunity in a case involving Chile's infamous Villa Grimaldi prison, where the current President, Michelle Bachelet, was tortured in 1975. A Chilean magistrate judge, Alejandro Solis, has now filed formal charges against the former dictator and issued a warrant for...
The reason I did not blog in the past few days is that I have been stuck in a most interesting discussion about whether there can be any place for human rights considerations in the WTO (see below Vietnam Wins Invitation to Join the WTO and The WTO...
I’m in Ottawa for a few days, attending the annual meeting of the Canadian Council on International Law – Canada’s equivalent to ASIL, but smaller. Fewer folks aside, the conference packs a powerful punch. I was here to present a paper, exploring how Principal-Agent theory (and Karen Alter’s Trustee variant) explains the U.S. relationship to the International...
The Supreme Court granted certiarori today in Microsoft v. AT&T, an important and complex case involving the extraterritorial scope of U.S. patent law protections (SCOTUSBlog has the summary here). The case will revolve around the interpretation of 35 U.S.C. 271(f), which prohibits the “suppl[y] * * * from the United States * * * [of] all or a...
The U.N. General Assembly's First Committee on Disarmament and International Security voted overwhelmingly yesterday to recommend the drafting of "a comprehensive, legally binding instrument establishing international standards in the trade on conventional arms." This was long expected, and the vote was a resounding 139-1, with the United States as the only country voting against the resolution (but with 24...
Hold all calls. I'm busy blogging. I've been blogging all morning. You should be blogging too. It's awesome. This hilarious video pokes fun at the self-important blogosphere. ...
The Rwandan government has established a commission to investigate France's possible responsibility in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. That commission heard testimony this week (see reports here and here). There are some pretty ugly allegations. The French soldiers established several communes in the former Gikongoro province, now Southern Province, on their arrival to what they called Operation Turquoise, MP Desire...
In case you haven’t seen this otherwise, here is a report from the Christian Science Monitor about Vice-President Cheney’s defense of waterboarding where he refers to it as a “no-brainer.” I wonder how John McCain is feeling now. The Monitor quotes at length from McClatchy:In the interview on Tuesday, Scott Hennen of WDAY Radio in Fargo, N.D., told...
President Bush signed a bill yesterday authorizing the construction of a 700 mile fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. The fence, of course, is very controversial, opposed not only by Mexico -- outgoing President Vicente Fox has called it "shameful" and likened it to the Berlin wall -- but also by the national union representing Border Patrol agents, the National...
The Working Party on the accession of Viet Nam to the WTO completed its discussions today in Geneva and decided to approve Vietnam's application to join. Final approval by the WTO General Council should occur before the end of the year and Vietnam would become the 150th member of the WTO, leaving only Russia, Ukraine, and Iran as the...
Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson have posted this piece on partisan entrenchment of constitutional norms. It’s a little juriscentric for my taste, although the piece is careful to allow for the constitutional consequence of legislative and executive branch actors (OLC in particular). It’s a useful historical description of how the appointments process has, on a hit-and-miss basis, worked...
