The chairman of an upcoming U.N. Conference on Small Arms Review tells Reuters he has received over 100,000 letters from U.S. gun-owners protesting the U.N.'s plot to ban all guns worldwide. According to the conference chairman, however, these letters are misguided. The small arms conference," he says, "will not negotiate any treaty to prohibit citizens of any country from...
Opinio Juris has been receiving a significant number of hits in recent days from Google searches for “North American Union.” The hits relate to a post by Julian Ku regarding last year's report by the Council on Foreign Relations on a proposed North American Community. All this traffic made me quite curious as to what was generated...
As a dedicated fan of NFL football, I always thought rugby was a silly game. For the record: I was wrong. The denizens of my newly-adopted country are rugby mad, and having watched two tests between New Zealand's All Blacks -- the world's best rugby team -- and Ireland, I now understand why. It's an amazing game,...
Last week we did a poll asking whether Ahmadinejad should be allowed to attend the World Cup. The poll seemed to express a strong preference to keep politics out of the World Cup, with 55% voting that Ahmadinejad should be allowed to attend Iranian matches in Germany. Now that Iran is out of the picture, the question of whether Ahmadinejad...
Yesterday, the United Nations Human Rights Council opened its inaugural session in Geneva. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan urged the new 47-member body to break with its much maligned predecessor, the U.N. Human Rights Commission: [T]he Council's work must mark a clean break from the past. That must be apparent in the way you develop and apply the universal periodic...
The ICC's Special Working Group on the Crime of Aggression has released an annotated agenda of its intersessional meeting last week at Princeton. The meeting addressed four interrelated issues: [1] The relationship between the crime of aggression and Article 25(3) of the Rome Statute, which establishes the possible forms of participation in a crime. Two different approaches have...
The Cambodian government has announced that the judges of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal will be sworn in on July 3, with prosecutors to begin "the formal launching of judicial work" on July 10. Trials are expected to begin in 2007. Cambodia and the UN agreed in 2003 to set up a hybrid tribunal to prosecute surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for...
For the last several years, the number of pro-whaling states in the International Whaling Commission (the constituent organ for the International Whaling Convention) has been steadily increasing. In particular, Japan, renowned for its “scientific whaling,” has courted various states to join the Convention and support its push for more whaling through a regional management scheme that would alleviate the moratorium...
I can understand Roger's desire to defend his former colleague, Colleen Graffy, whose ill-considered comments compounded the diplomatic problem facing the U.S. following the suicide of two Saudis and one Yemeni at Guantanamo last weekend. But there is little there to defend. Certainly the administration did not think so. The State Department distanced itself from Graffy's remarks with...
Colleen Graffy, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy, has been in hot water this week for her remark that the three suicides at Guantanamo Bay were a "PR stunt." She did not actually use those words, which were quoted as verbatim from the BBC and ignited the controversy. There is no BBC link to the transcript...
Now, my recent effort doesn’t qualify as a bestseller, but it certainly has a fair bit to say about international law. But what do actual bestsellers say about international law? Well, this week in lieu of seeing the movie I finally read The Da Vinci Code. Like others before me, although I enjoyed it as a thriller, I was troubled...
This week I am in Dallas, Texas participating in a conference sponsored by the Institute for Transnational Arbitration on the subject of Investment Treaty Arbitration in the 21st Century. Details here. The focus of the conference was on investment arbitration before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID). The keynote speaker for the conference...
